UC-NRLF 


UNIVERSITY 
MILITANT 

BY  CHARLES  FERGUSON 


LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

Class 


. 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


The 
University  Militant 

by 
CHARLES  FERGUSON 


MITCHELL    KENNERLEY 
NEW   YORK   AND   LONDON 
MCMXI 


COPYRIGHT,    I9II,   BY 
MITCHELL    KENNERLEY 


THE    UNIVERSITY    PRESS,    CAMBRIDGE,    U.  8.  A. 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


Contents 

PAGE 

PREFACE  7 

INTRODUCTORY  9 

THE  NEW  POLITICAL  ECONOMY  20 

WHAT  is  GOVERNMENT  FOR  27 

WHAT  is  THE  MISSION  OF  THE  CHURCH  38 

WHAT  is  A  SCHOOL  51 

THE  INSTITUTIONAL  PRINCIPLE  64 

THE    THREE    GREAT    VISIONS    OF    THE    OLD 

WORLD  68 

THE  RISE  OF  THE  NEW  CREATIVE  ORDER  78 

THE  RISE  OF  FREE   CITIES    UNDER    THE    NEW 

ORDER  90 

NATIONAL  UNIVERSITY  TOWNS  98 

THE    SPIRITUAL    INTEGRATION    OF    THE    NEW 

INDUSTRIAL  ORDER  116 

THE  COMMUNISM  OF  THE  INTELLECT  125 

THE  UNIVERSITY  —  MISTRESS  OF  THE  MARKET  133 

5 

220993 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


PAGE 

SUMMARY  142 

ADDENDA 

Publisher's  Note  150 

For  the  Whole  of  Kansas   City  —  East  and 

West  150 

The  Newsbook  152 

The  Municipal  University  162 

For  a  University  Quadrangle  172 

Notes  174 

The  Work  of  a  Citizens'  Lobby  181 


PREFACE 

rHIS  book  is  addressed  to  those  who  understand 
that  great  changes  are  taking  place  in  the 
order  of  the  world ;  that  religion,  politics,  education, 
business  cannot  possibly  be  the  same,  day  after  to- 
morrow that  they  are  to-day;  that  decrepit  insti- 
tutions are  swiftly  passing  away,  and  new  ones, 
with  fresh  vigor  and  portent,  are  lifting  their  prom- 
ises into  the  light. 

In  particular  it  offers  itself  to  those  who  are  escap- 
ing from  the  ruins  of  the  old  religious  and  political 
superstitions,  without  leaving  either  their  faith  or 
their  prudence  behind  them  ;  those  who  are  disposed 
to  build  for  themselves,  while  there  is  yet  time,  a 
nevyjjitellectual  and  spiritual  establishment  that  shall 
be  strong  enough  to  withstand  both  the  seductions  of 
the  money-power  and  the  assaults  of  the  mob. 


is  manifesto  of  the  University  Militant  under- 
takes to  give  the  spirit  of  the  University  a  political 
rating  in  as  many  towns  as  can  seize  the  point  of  it. 

Its  persuasion  that  this  spirit  has,  by  rights,  a 
primary  jurisdiction  in  practical  affairs,  is  not  tenta- 
tive, but  confident  and  well  tried. 


8  PREFACE 


The  writer  has  spent  all  his  working  years  in  find- 
ing out  what  is  the  matter  with  Society.  To  escape 
from  the  waste  of  guessing  he  has  subjected  himself 
to  the  contrasting  disciplines  of  the  three  Sociological 
professions  —  the  Law,  the  Church,  and  the  News. 

He  is  a  member  of  the  New  Tork  bar,  was  one 
time  rector  of  St.  James'  Church  in  Syracuse  —  now 
called  a  "cathedral"  —  and  for  some  years  has  been 
writing  editorials  for  the  Hearst  newspapers.  He 
has  thus  triangulated  his  problem,  as  an  astronomer 
does. 

What  is  written  herein  is  submitted  as  good  law, 
good  theology,  and  good  journalism.  The  fact  that  it 
could  not  be  pleaded  in  any  existing  court,  preached 
from  any  known  pulpit  or  printed  in  any  extant  news- 
paper,  judges  not  it,  but  them. 

It  will  have  its  day  in  court,  in  church  and  in  the 
despatches.  Or  else  there  will  be  the  Fates  to  pay. 

NATIONAL  ARTS  CLUE 

Gramercy  Park,  New  Tork 
April  ijtA, 


THE 
UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 

I 
INTRODUCTORY 

WHEN  the  Master  of  History  sends  into 
the  world  a  great  idea,  He  does  not  work 
it  out  in  a  day.  He  takes  time.  Nobody  ever 
understood  a  great  idea  until  after  it  had  been 
knocked  around  the  world  for  a  thousand  years 
or  so.  When  the  idea  first  makes  its  appearance, 
it  is  scarcely  an  idea  at  all;  it  is  a  passion.  No- 
body has  it  —  it  has  somebody  by  the  vitals.  It 
masters  him,  as  Heine  says,  and  forces  him  into 
the  arena,  where,  like  a  gladiator,  he  is  compelled, 
whether  he  will  or  no,  to  fight  for  it. 

Next  the  idea  gets  itself  uttered  in  the  form 
of  an  institution  —  an  institution  all  poetry  and 
pure  flame  —  totally  misunderstood  and  unintel- 
ligible, until  it  has  burned  itself  up  and  passed 
out  of  existence,  covering  the  whole  earth  with 
good  wood-ashes.  Then  a  few  careless  ages  slip 
away,  and  behold!  the  white  ashes  are  wheat. 
Your  big  idea  is  ready  for  business. 

It  is  after  this  fashion  that  the  world  is  dealing 
9 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


with  the  university  idea.  We  have  not  yet  seen 
a  university,  the  real  thing  —  sap-full  and  substan- 
tial. We  have  had  only  the  fine  ardor  of  Abelard 
and  his  contemporaries  —  and  the  fructifying 
ashes.  We  have  had  the  prophetic  type  and  the 
ages  of  expectation;  it  is  full  time  for  the  anti- 
type, the  actual  event  —  full  time  for  the  veritable 
thing  itself  to  happen. 

Now  the  university,  in  its  original  and  essential 
character,  has  some  sort  of  a  distant  relationship 
to  the  institutions  that  have  lately  been  going  by 
the  name,  but  the  family  likeness  is  not  emphatic. 
Harvard  University  and  the  so-called  University 
of  California,  for  example,  bear  about  the  same 
relation  to  the  essential  university  idea  that  Mrs. 
Eddy's  Church  or  the  excellent  Society  of  Univer- 
salists  bears  to  the  world-historic  church  idea.  The 
university  idea  has  hard  work  to  find  itself  in  any 
sort  of  superior  academy  or  finishing  school  for 
young  ladies  and  gentlemen. 

The  university  is  a  social  and  political  concep- 
tion —  the  modern  and  democratic  mode  of  social 
organization.  It  is  social  organization  for  the  pro- 
motion of  the  humanities. 

The  humanities  mean  the  happiness  of  every- 
body—  what  the  fathers  called  the  general  wel- 
fare. And  that  is  a  very  different  thing  from  the 
thing  that  the  undemocratic  governments  of  the 

10 


INTRODUCTORY 


old  world  have  aimed  at.  Aristocratic  govern- 
ments are  not  concerned  about  the  happiness  of 
everybody.  They  exist  to  promote  the  happiness 
of  those  that  they  adjudge  to  be  worthy  of  happi- 
ness, and  to  make  sure  of  the  unhappiness  of  such 
as  are  accounted  worthy  of  being  miserable.  Gov- 
ernment, according  to  the  Old  World  way  of 
thinking,  is  a  superhuman  thing.  It  does  not  feel 
as  live  men  feel  or  see  as  they  see.  Its  character- 
istic symbol  is  a  fair  woman  without  a  heart,  iron 
scales  in  her  hand  and  scales  upon  her  eyes  —  or 
blinded  with  a  bandage. 

Aristocratic  government  is  the  sworn  enemy  of 
the  humanities  and  of  the  free,  uncalculating  fine 
arts.  It  is  conscientiously  opposed  to  all  that  sort 
of  thing  —  opposed,  at  any  rate,  to  giving  real 
and  practical  significance  to  that  sort  of  thing. 
It  follows  as  a  matter  of  course  that  the  university, 
under  the  aristocratic  regime,  must  be  a  pale,  etio- 
lated affair,  with  the  blood  dried  out;  a  kind  of 
gibbering  ghost,  full  of  reminiscence  and  prophecy, 
but  having  nothing  to  say  in  the  present  tense. 
Its  humanities  must,  before  all  things,  be  polite 
and  cautious.  They  must  not  on  any  account  af- 
front the  studied  inhumanities  of  the  blind  goddess 
of  justice.  And  as  for  the  fine  arts,  it  behooves 
them  to  be  so  fine  that  only  the  elect  can  view 
them  with  the  natural  eye. 

n 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


Now  the  significant  fact,  surprising  as  it  may 
seem,  is  that  our  soi-disant  universities  in  America 
are  in  their  theory  and  ground-plan  wholly  and 
simply  aristocratic.  They  have  grown  compara- 
tively cheap  and  accessible,  to  be  sure,  but  that 
does  not  change  their  nature.  A  thing  is  not  demo- 
cratic because  it  is  cheap.  The  American  colleges 
have  grown  up  under  the  shadow  of  Europe,  and 
they  have  not  had  much  sun  and  wind  in  their 
cloisters  up  to  the  present  time.  It  took  eight 
years  for  the  American  Revolution,  and  then  a 
full  century  and  a  quarter  more  to  finish  it  up 
and  bury  the  dead. 

We  are  just  beginning  to  get  clear  of  the  coasts 
of  Europe.  And  the  college  authorities  are  likely 
to  be  the  last  of  the  passengers  to  sight  Fire  Island 
and  Sandy  Hook.  The  whole  scheme  of  our  Amer- 
ican colleges  has  been  adjusted  to  the  aristocratic 
theory  that  the  public  is  at  best  a  docile  fool  and 
that  only  the  certificated  schoolmaster  is  wise.  The 
professors  have  stood  in  a  purely  pedagogic  atti- 
tude toward  the  people.  This  being  understood, 
it  is  to  be  set  down  to  the  credit  of  our  democracy, 
as  a  mitigating  circumstance,  that  only  helpless 
boys  and  girls  have  submitted  to  go  to  college.  In 
the  Middle  Ages,  men  and  women  went.  But  then 
the  case  was  altogether  different.  In  that  rosy 
dawn  of  the  university  idea  the  university  was 

12 


INTRODUCTORY 


democratic.  In  the  twelfth  century  the  university 
was  a  self-governing  commonwealth.  The  stu- 
dents had  the  suffrage  and  managed  the  corpora- 
tion; the  professors  did  not  speak  de  haut  en  has 
like  princes  and  bishops. 

A  university,  properly  speaking,  exists  to  get  at 
the  truth  —  the  truth  of  human  nature  and  of  the 
nature  of  things.  And  when  it  begins  by  despising 
the  unsophisticated  human  instincts  and  the  com- 
mon experience  of  men  at  work  in  the  real  world, 
it  begins  by  blowing  its  brains  out.  A  university 
governed  not  by  living  and  learning  people,  but 
by  officers  of  state  or  administrators  of  estates, 
is  no  university  at  all.  In  some  cases  it  is  nothing 
worth  mentioning;  but  if  it  is  anything,  it  is  an 
academy,  a  college  or  a  technical  school.  The  uni- 
versity idea  is  not  in  it  —  unless  as  a  protesting 
spirit,  a  Nemesis  of  outraged  art  and  science.  For 
the  fact  is  that  officers  of  state  and  the  administra- 
tors of  estates  are  ipso  facto  the  devoted  pro- 
tagonists of  the  existing  conventionalities  in  poli- 
tics, in  religion,  in  science,  in  art,  in  everything. 
And,  as  officers  and  administrators,  the  business 
of  getting  at  the  truth  is  simply  not  in  their  line. 
They  may  indeed  have  another  character  as  well 
—  human  interests  apart  from  their  official  duty. 
But  so  far  as  they  are  "  true  to  their  trust"  they 
are  bound  to  see  that  society  shall  not  get  any 


THE    UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


nearer  the  truth  than  it  is  —  that  the  existing  con- 
ventional substitutes  shall  be  made  to  serve  their 
time, 

The  business  of  getting  at  the  truth  always  flies 
in  the  face  of  conventionality,  of  the  things  agreed 
upon.  The  things  agreed  upon  are,  in  fact,  the 
only  real  obstacles  to  artistic  and  scientific  progress. 
The  sciences  and  the  arts  have  advanced  with  such 
incredible  slowness  through  the  ages,  not  because 
of  any  natural  difficulty  —  there  was  no  lack  of  nat- 
ural faculty  and  no  lack  of  plastic  materials ;  the  ad- 
vance has  been  so  slow  wholly  because  of  the  con- 
ventional and  artificial  difficulties.  The  advance 
of  the  arts  and  sciences  has  always  and  inevitably 
tended  to  the  unsettling,  the  mobilizing  of  existing 
social  arrangements;  and  these  same  worthy  offi- 
cers of  state  and  administrators  of  estates  have 
always  stood  in  the  front  of  the  battle,  with  set 
teeth,  to  defend  the  status  quo.  It  is  no  shame 
to  them.  They  did  of  old  the  best  they  knew,  and 
doubtless  are  still  doing  it.  But  they  do  not  under- 
stand the  meaning  of  the  university,  and  cannot 
learn. 

The  university  does  not  indeed  set  itself  in 
stubborn  opposition  to  any  of  the  existing  arrange- 
ments of  law  or  custom.  It  simply  regards  them 
as  it  regards  any  other  phenomena  within  the 
field  of  science  —  as  things  to  be  questioned  and 

14 


INTRODUCTORY 


looked  into;  to  be  looked  through,  if  possible, 
for  the  discovery  of  something  beyond  them  more 
real  and  respectable  than  they  are.  And  that  is  a 
temper  of  mind  that  in  the  nature  of  the  case  can 
never  be  other  than  antipathetic  to  people  that 
draw  salaries  through  the  faithful  defence  of  old 
statutes  and  dead  men's  estates. 

We  hear  a  great  deal  of  talk  in  these  days 
about  academic  freedom;  impatient  reformers  say 
hard  and  inconsiderate  words  about  the  boards 
of  trustees  and  boards  of  regents  that  refuse  to 
college  professors  the  supposed  inalienable  right  of 
saying  anything  they  please.  The  hard  words  are 
inconsiderate  because  they  come  nowhere  near  the 
root  of  the  matter.  The  fault  is  not  in  the  gov- 
erning boards  of  the  college  —  in  any  special 
sense;  it  is  in  the  whole  frame  and  structure  of 
the  institutions  from  top  to  bottom.  So  long  as 
the  things  called  universities  are  what  they  are  — 
aristocratic  institutions  —  they  must  be  governed, 
if  governed  at  all,  on  aristocratic  principles.  When 
the  real  and  democratic  university  arises,  it  will 
doubtless  be  governed  on  democratic  principles  — 
the  teachers  will  keep  their  places  as  long  as  the 
plain  people  can  believe  in  them.  Meanwhile  the 
professors  in  colleges  who  claim  the  right  to  say 
in  their  class-rooms  whatever  they  happen  to 
think,  or  even  what  the  mass  of  the  people  who 

15 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


do  not  go  to  college  happen  to  think,  will  without 
doubt  continue  to  find  themselves  out  of  court. 
The  fond  ideal  of  intellectual  liberty  in  a  well- 
endowed  moral  vacuum  never  has  been  realized 
upon  the  earth;  and,  for  the  sake  of  intellectual 
and  moral  virility,  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  it  never 
will  be.  Even  the  cherubim  and  seraphim  have 
their  responsibilities  and  are  obliged  to  keep  on 
good  terms  with  somebody  in  order  to  hold  their 
places  in  the  orchestra  of  heaven. 

The  rise  of  the  industrial  order  is  bound  up  with 
the  renaissance  of  the  university  idea.  The  or- 
ganization of  industry  on  a  grand  scale  requires 
the  organization  of  the  people,  in  the  spirit  of 
the  arts  and  sciences.  In  the  absence  of  such  an  or- 
ganization of  the  people,  the  people  are  bound  to 
be  slaves  of  the  machine;  there  is  no  help  for  it 
either  under  the  existing  plutocratic  regime  or 
under  that  promised  order  of  politico-economic 
centralization  which  is  now  dangling  its  Dead  Sea 
apples  before  our  eyes  under  the  name  of  "  scien- 
tific "  socialism. 

This  spirit  of  the  arts  and  sciences  is  the  quint- 
essential religion  of  modern  times  —  that  living, 
working  faith  in  the  moral  soundness  of  human 
nature  and  the  nature  of  things,  which  is  finding 
in  the  constitution  of  the  universe  the  sufficient 
statutes  of  social  order  and  is  putting  all  extrinsic 

16 


INTRODUCTORY 


authorities  out  of  business.  Without  this  faith  and 
the  organization  of  society  on  the  basis  of  this 
faith,  the  people  would  inevitably  be  crushed  by 
the  machinery  of  modern  civilization.  But  the 
people  will  not  be  crushed.  Not  in  America,  at 
least  For  in  America  the  university  of  the  people 
is  a  fact  practically  assured  by  the  whole  course  of 
our  history. 

It  is  a  matter  of  no  little  significance,  as  bearing 
on  this  point,  that  the  frontier  of  American  civili- 
zation in  its  sweep  across  the  continent  has  always 
•been  marked  and  spaced  by  an  unbroken  sentry- 
line  of  school-houses.  The  farther  you  go  west, 
the  more  school-houses  there  are  in  proportion 
to  the  census  of  souls.  The  longer  the  haul  and 
the  steeper  the  grade  as  you  go  up  the  slope  of  the 
Great  Divide,  the  more  recklessly  do  the  people 
pay  the  freight  —  for  schools.  And  the  "  genius 
of  these  States  "  sits  throned  on  the  Sierras  in 
Arizona,  quaffing  a  cup  of  knowledge  that  is  paid 
for  by  the  highest  school-tax  rate  in  the  whole 
world. 

Those  who  would  argue  from  this  state  of  af- 
fairs that  the  moving  man  in  the  New  World  is 
specially  great  for  book-learning  are  superficial  or 
misinformed.  The  American  people  have  never 
had  an  overweening  respect  for  schoolmasters. 
The  history  of  our  public  school  system  shows  that 


THE    UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


Americans  generally  have  not  cared  much  either 
for  the  quality  or  the  quantity  of  their  schoolmas- 
tering  —  have  regarded  the  scholastic  processes 
as  a  kind  of  pious  ritual  to  be  got  through  with 
in  a  penitent  spirit  —  with  generous  congratula- 
tions and  cheers  for  the  superior  sort  of  men,  the 
Washingtons  and  Lincolns,  who  have  been  counted 
worthy  to  escape  the  punishment  of  a  scholastic 
education. 

The  American  people  have  a  spiritual  passion 
as  strong  as  their  mastery  of  materials,  and  the 
"  little  red  school-house  "  has  stood  in  our  imag- 
ination, not  so  much  a  thing  of  utilitarian  value  as 
a  thing  of  spiritual  significance  —  a  homely,  thrill- 
ing symbol  of  the  conquest  of  matter  by  mind, 
the  victorious  march  of  the  creative  spirit  of  man 
across  the  deserts  and  wildernesses  of  the  world. 
The  school-house  has  served  as  the  church  of  the 
religion  of  democracy,  the  shrine  of  our  secret  but 
sincere  devotion,  and  that,  not  because  of,  but  in 
spite  of  its  heritage  of  pedantry  and  prose. 

The  revolution  now  in  progress  in  what  is  called 
the  science  and  art  of  pedagogics  amounts  to 
nothing  less  than  the  complete  overthrow  of  the 
schoolmaster,  the  abolishment  of  the  reign  of  the 
pedagogue. 

And  this  overthrow  of  the  schoolmaster  is  the 
final  step  in  the  evolution  of  democratic  society. 

18 


INTRODUCTORY 


For  the  strength  of  all  economic  and  political  mon- 
opoly has  lain  in  the  thralldom  of  the  intellect  to 
the  formularies  of  the  past.  Up  to  this  time  the 
dead  hand  of  the  old  order  of  the  world  has  held 
fast  its  mortgage  upon  the  future  through  its 
clutch  upon  the  minds  of  the  children.  But  that 
clutch  is  loosening  now;  even  the  children  at  length 
are  to  go  free.  And  the  defeat  of  the  schoolmaster 
carries  with  it  the  defeat  of  the  master  of  the 
sword  and  of  the  purse.  With  the  pedagogues  cast 
out,  grown  men  can  without  shame  go  to  school. 
Every  man  becomes  a  teacher — and  a  learner. 
And  so  with  every  child.  And  there  is  not  a 
school-house  in  the  republic  but  is  destined  to  be- 
come a  university  of  the  people,  a  nerve-ganglion 
of  the  new  social  organization  in  the  spirit  of  the 
arts  and  sciences. 


THE    UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


II 

THE  NEW  POLITICAL  ECONOMY 

IN  the  mediaeval  university  theology  was  "  the 
queen  of  the  sciences."  The  modern  univer- 
sity moves  toward  the  conception  that  the  domi- 
nant and  all-correlating  interest  of  learning  is 
sociology.  And  sociology  is  only  a  new-found  and 
bookish  name  for  political  economy  in  its  widest 
aspect.  So  we  may  venture  to  say  that  in  that  uni- 
versity of  the  people  which  is  now  in  the  making 
it  will  be  understood  that  political  economy  is  the 
queen  of  the  sciences  —  the  sovereign  mistress  of 
all  the  arts  as  well. 

In  the  cloistered  universities  of  our  day,  al- 
though the  name  of  theology  has  suffered  some 
discredit,  the  professorial  mind  is  still  riveted  to 
the  theological  point  of  view.  The  good-men 
of  the  gown  still  look  upon  Truth  as  a  transccn 
dental  thing,  fit  only  for  contemplation  and  wor- 
ship, a  word  to  be  spelled  with  a  capital  letter. 
As  the  truth  comes  more  and  more  to  be  thought 
of  as  the  sum  of  those  urgent  realities  with  which 
we  must  wrestle  in  making  ourselves  a  place  in 

20 


THE   NEW  POLITICAL   ECONOMY 


the  universe,  the  transcendentalism  of  learning 
gives  place  to  a  frank  pragmatism.  Theology  is 
transmuted  into  sociology  as  the  intellect  girds 
itself  to  make  the  fortune  of  humanity  in  the  real 
world.  This  change  of  philosophic  view-point 
implies  and  requires  that  the  university  must  aban- 
don its  classic  shades  and  set  up  its  standard  in  the 
market-place.  The  institution  whose  master-pas- 
sion is  to  subdue  the  earth  and  build  the  cities 
ceases  to  be  a  reservation  for  book-men  and  be- 
comes the  rallying-ground  of  the  workers  and 
those  that  think  in  the  concrete.  It  becomes  the 
public  school  of  grown  men,  the  institutional  basis 
of  democratic  law,  the  political  primary  of  the 
new  industrial  order. 

Political  economy  is  the  study  of  the  laws  of 
the  universe  for  the  purpose  of  finding  out  how  to 
increase  the  wealth  of  men  in  the  mass.  The  study 
begins  with  the  assumption  that  there  are  univer- 
sal laws  of  wealth,  laws  that  exist  in  the  nature  of 
man  and  the  nature  of  things.  It  assumes  that 
the  raising  of  the  general  standard  of  living  is  a 
reasonable  and  practicable  aim,  that  there  is  no 
necessary  opposition  between  the  real  wealth  of 
a  particular  person  and  that  of  any  and  all 
others.  It  assumes,  in  short,  that  the  universe 
is  moral  and  rational  in  its  ground-plan.  There 
could  be  no  such  thing  as  political  or  public  econ- 

21 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


omy,  if  wealth  in  one  quarter  necessarily  implied 
poverty  in  another;  there  could  be  only  a  personal 
and  private  economy. 

This  study  is  both  an  art  and  a  science,  but  it 
is  not  peculiar  in  this  respect,  since  all  studies  are 
barren  that  are  not  at  once  artistic  and  scientific, 
and  we  can  have  real  knowledge  of  the  facts  of 
nature  only  by  making  trial  of  them  in  the  prose- 
cution of  our  designs.  True  political  economy, 
therefore,  frankly  addresses  itself  not  only  to  the 
discovery,  but  also  to  the  enforcement  of  the  laws 
of  wealth-production. 

Wealth,  in  the  technical  sense  of  economics,  is 
that  portion  of  the  means  of  human  welfare  that 
is  produced  by  work.  The  natural  conditions  of 
existence  come  within  the  scope  of  political  econ- 
omy only  so  far  as  they  submit  themselves  to 
processes  of  improvement  under  the  will  of  the 
artist  and  the  worker.  This  investigation  does  not 
deal  primarily  with  the  sun,  moon  and  stars,  or 
with  the  mysterious  springs  of  health;  there  is  an 
infinite  world  without,  and  also  an  infinite  world 
within  us,  that  only  remotely  relates  itself  to  our 
study.  Political  economy  immediately  concerns 
itself  with  the  improvable  relations  between  men 
and  the  materials  of  their  environment. 

It  is  the  note  of  man,  as  distinguished  from  the 
beasts,  that  he  can  by  conscious  effort  better  his 

22 


THE   NEW  POLITICAL   ECONOMY 


standing  in  the  material  world.  Characteristically 
a  man  is  a  worker,  a  creator  of  values,  a  world- 
maker.  He  alone,  of  all  living  things,  can  conceive 
designs  and  execute  them,  can  imagine  conditions 
that  do  not  exist,  and  then  by  patience  bring  them 
to  pass.  To  take  the  world  wholly  as  one  finds  it 
and  leave  it  so  is  brutal.  A  man  is  a  man  only 
because  he  is  a  wealth-producer,  an  enricher  of 
existence. 

All  wealth  is  sacramental;  it  is  to  be  known  by 
this  sign,  that  it  is  a  means  of  grace,  an  embodi- 
ment of  the  human  ideal.  It  is  the  physical  vehicle 
of  something  that  is  not  physical.  An  item  of 
wealth  is  a  palpable  thing  vitalized  by  the  human 
will  with  a  spiritual  quality,  a  power  to  sustain  life. 
Things  endowed  with  this  life-sustaining  quality, 
but  existing  independent  of  the  effort  of  men  — 
the  sea,  the  open  air  —  are  not  indeed  to  be  re- 
garded as  wealth,  in  the  sense  of  this  study.  But 
there  is  no  man-engendered  value  —  the  touch  of 
a  good  physician,  the  song  of  a  sweet  singer  — 
that  can,  without  intellectual  confusion,  be  ex- 
cluded from  the  purview  of  political  economy. 

The  old  economists  said  that  wealth  is  "  that 
which  has  exchange  value  " ;  that  all  things  are 
wealth  that  are  bought  and  sold  in  the  market. 
This  was  a  definition  by  accident,  and  not  by 
essence.  It  is  true  that  most  things  that  are  really 

23 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


wealth  are  bought  and  sold;  but  it  is  not  the  mar- 
keting that  proves  them  wealth.  The  definition 
left  the  study  of  economics  bottomless.  For  to 
say  that  wealth  is  that  which  has  value  in  exchange 
was  as  if  one  should  say  that  wealth  is  anything 
that  anybody  thinks  is  wealth  and  will  pay  for. 
Thus  their  science  of  economics  was  no  science  at 
all;  for  there  can  be  no  science  of  whims  and 
fashions.  It  was  dismal  because  it  was  without 
light  or  leading —  a  heart-sickening  labyrinth  that 
led  nowhither.  Starting  with  such  a  definition  of 
its  subject-matter,  the  old  economics  could  estab- 
lish no  sound  relations  with  the  nature  of  man  or 
the  nature  of  things.  It  broke  with  art  and  science 
and  committed  itself  to  bewildering  and  fruitless 
speculations. 

The  new  economy  is  solidly  grounded  in  the 
facts  of  human  nature  and  the  material  world. 
It  insists  that  wealth  is  that,  and  that  only,  which 
is  really  good  for  something  —  man  being  what  he 
is  and  things  what  they  are;  that  it  is  the  sum  of 
all  good  things  produced  by  the  energy  of  human 
good- will. 

Political  economy  hitherto  has  had  but  a  distant 
and  contingent  relation  to  politics  and  positive 
law;  thus  its  name  has  seemed  ill-chosen.  But 
the  new  political  economy  is  political  indeed.  It 
promises  to  draw  into  its  own  field  all  the  passion 

24 


THE   NEW   POLITICAL   ECONOMY 


of  politics  and  all  the  force  of  law.  It  is  no  longer 
content  to  tabulate  statistics  or  to  explain  the 
phenomena  of  glut  and  hunger.  It  has  added  to 
its  intelligence  a  will.  It  has  a  purpose  and  a  pro- 
gramme. Economy  is,  by  etymology,  house-keep- 
ing ;  and  the  new  political  economy  intends  to  keep 
house. 

All  the  grand  interests  of  society  are  gravitating 
toward  the  problem  of  wealth-creating.  It  is  in 
this  all-absorbing  interest  that  one  finds  the  emo- 
tional centre  of  the  age  in  which  we  live.  The 
new  political  economy  undertakes  to  exhibit  the 
action  of  the  immutable  laws  of  art  and  science. 
It  would  show  how  to  build  cities  that  will  stand 
the  strain  of  nature,  how  to  increase  the  leverage 
of  the  human  arm  for  the  subdual  of  the  earth, 
how  to  make  goods  cheap  and  men  dear.  We 
awake  to  the  discovery  that  such  are  the  true  aims 
of  government  and  law.  We  are  convinced  that 
these  concerns  are  the  core  of  sound  education 
also.  And  we  are  sure  that  nothing  lies  nearer 
the  heart  of  religion.  Thus  the  genius  of  the  new 
political  economy  stands  at  the  cross-roads  where 
all  ways  meet. 

The  three  following  chapters  undertake  to  show 
how  the  three  capital  interests  of  society  —  poli- 
tics, education,  religion  —  are,  in  their  actual  lines 
of  development,  converging  toward  a  common 

25 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


issue.  They  all  are  striving  together  toward  the 
solution  of  the  problem  which  is  the  special  pre- 
occupation of  the  new  economics,  to  wit:  How 
to  make  the  human  spirit  more  at  home  in  the 
material  world. 


26 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


Ill 

WHAT  IS  GOVERNMENT  FOR? 

THE  saying  of  Edmund  Burke,  that  a  state  is 
a  "  partnership  in  the  arts  and  sciences,  in 
every  virtue  and  in  all  perfection,"  has  until  recent 
times  been  taken  by  the  English-speaking  race  as 
mere  literature.  But  it  was  prophecy.  The  real 
political  revolution  is  not  in  the  triumph  of  the 
bourgeoisie  over  the  aristocrats,  or  of  the  prole- 
tarians over  the  middle  class;  it  is  in  the  triumph 
of  the  idea  of  the  state  as  a  working-partnership 
over  the  idea  of  the  state  as  a  sovereign  power. 
The  real  revolution  is  a  new  orientation  of  the 
mind;  it  puts  into  the  minds  of  the  people  a  new 
conception  of  the  meaning  and  end  of  government, 
a  new  idea  of  what  the  law  is,  and  what  it  is  for. 

The  old  regime,  from  which  we  are  beginning 
to  shake  ourselves  free,  believed  in  the  state  as  a 
sovereign  power.  This  power  had,  in  its  develop- 
ment, two  principal  phases,  as  has  been  shown, 
with  sun-clear  lucidity,  by  Sir  Henry  Maine.  It 
was  first  based  upon  caste  or  "  status,"  and  then 
upon  contract  or  "  the  consent  of  the  governed," 

27 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


but  in  both  cases  government  held  itself  aloof  from 
the  working  world.  Its  law  had  no  clear  corres- 
pondence with  the  laws  of  art  and  science;  it  was 
not  affected  by  technological  considerations ;  it  dis- 
regarded the  engineering  problem  as  to  how  best 
to  raise  the  general  standard  of  living  and  put 
the  people  in  possession  of  the  earth.  On  the 
contrary,  it  undertook  to  supplant  the  natural  laws 
of  evolution  by  legal  conventionalities  —  first,  the 
conventionalities  of  custom,  then  those  of  contract. 
Nobody  questions  that  the  systems  of  status 
were  devoid  of  social  enterprise;  they  rested 
frankly  upon  old  habits.  It  has  been  supposed, 
however,  that  the  advent  of  the  "  social  contract " 
changed  all  that.  But  it  did  not.  It  did  not  break 
the  sway  of  custom,  put  enterprise  into  the  law 
or  make  the  state  a  working-partnership.  The 
theory  of  the  social  contract  was  broached  by 
Hobbes  in  the  interest  of  absolutism,  by  Locke  as 
a  defender  of  constitutional  monarchy,  and  by 
Rousseau  as  the  herald  of  the  French  Revolution ; 
in  one  form  or  another  it  has  been  accepted  by 
most  modern  lawyers  and  political  speculators. 
But  plainly  it  has  no  power  to  abolish  the  rule  of 
privilege.  In  the  shape  in  which  the  theory  still 
possesses  men's  minds  in  this  country,  the  law  of 
the  land  is  thought  of  as  existing  not  to  clear  a 
way  for  the  advancement  of  the  arts  and  sciences, 

28 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


but  merely  to  consecrate  and  enforce  all  actual 
bargains,  beginning  with  the  contract  made  by  the 
fathers  of  the  Federal  Constitution  and  proceeding 
thence  to  every  man's  account  with  his  grocer.  Ac- 
cording to  this  view,  the  law  is  merely  a  force  to 
compel  men  to  keep  their  promises.  The  symbol 
of  its  justice  is,  as  has  been  said,  a  blinded  goddess 
with  scales  in  her  hands.  She  sees  nothing,  feels 
nothing,  save  only  the  balancing  of  the  accounts 
between  man  and  man.  Her  law  is  superhuman  or 
subhuman.  Her  spirit  is  passionless  and  ab- 
stracted. She  knows  not  the  bounding  pulse  of 
ambition  or  the  fierce  struggle  for  a  fuller  life. 
She  has  no  creative  ideals,  no  art.  The  elemental 
world  also  she  utterly  ignores.  For  her  there  are 
no  deserts  to  be  watered,  no  wildernesses  to  be 
cleared;  she  is  no  city-builder.  The  book  of  chem- 
istry and  physics  is  sealed  to  her  eyes.  She  would 
do  what  she  calls  justice  though  the  heavens  fell; 
would  enforce  a  bonded  bargain  though  it  devas- 
tate the  earth. 

Because  this  blind  goddess  of  contractual  justice 
denies  our  social  "  partnership  in  the  arts  and 
sciences,"  her  sway  is  now  questioned  by  the  modern 
spirit,  and  the  real  political  revolution  is  at  length 
lifting  its  standards  of  revolt.  Because  she  has 
broken  all  the  laws  of  life,  the  imperative  and  un- 
conventional ordinances  of  science,  because  she  has 

29 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


respected  only  the  things  agreed  upon,  she  is 
branded  "  Arch-anarchist "  by  the  men  of  the 
modern  spirit  —  and  her  rule  is  proscribed. 

The  new  politics  bases  itself  not  upon  any  con- 
ventional arrangements  whatever^  not  upon  a  writ- 
ten constitution  or  a  traditional  one,  but  upon  those 
immutable  and  self-vindicating  laws  that  fix  the 
conditions  of  human  progress  —  the  articles  of  the 
constitution  of  the  universe.  A  programme  is  not 
good  merely  because  it  has  been  agreed  upon;  a 
bargain  is  not  made  just  by  being  signed  and 
sealed;  and  nobody  has  a  right  to  stand  in  the  way 
of  civilization  merely  because  it  has  been  so  written 
in  a  bond.  Gravitation  and  the  chemical  affinities, 
the  inspiration  of  artists,  the  enterprising  hands  of 
engineers,  and  the  hearts  of  lovers,  all  alike  are 
in  conspiracy  to  "  impair  the  obligations  of  con- 
tracts." It  is  settled  that  the  most  imperative  obli- 
gation of  law  is  to  create  the  artistic  and  scientific 
conditions  of  social  existence.  The  authority  of 
civil  law  lies  in  its  congruity  with  the  natural  laws 
of  growth  and  improvement;  and  the  test  of  the 
constitutionality  of  a  statute  is  this:  Does  its 
operation  tend  to  raise  the  purchasing-power  of 
a  day's  work? 

It  is  only  with  the  prevalence  of  such  a  con- 
ception of  the  source  and  sanction  of  law  that  the 
civil  order  becomes  indeed  a  partnership  for  the 

30 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


advancement  of  the  arts  and  sciences.  The  mental 
revolution  which  is  to  bring  this  momentous  change 
to  pass  is  now  in  full  career.  The  day  is  at  hand 
in  which  it  shall  be  possible  for  a  lawyer  to  stand 
up  in  court  and  say:  "  I  admit  that  I  am  not  in  line 
with  the  precedents,  but  I  ask  for  judgment  on 
technological  grounds.  The  law  exists  to  mobilize 
the  creative  forces  of  society;  and  I  am  able  to 
show  that  the  case  of  my  client  is  in  line  with  the 
sound  rules  of  city-building." 

It  was  possible  for  the  non-industrial  ages  to 
draft  their  codes  of  law  in  disregard  of  the  general 
engineering  problem.  They  could  settle  their  ques- 
tions of  right  and  wrong,  without  considering  how 
to  put  tools  into  the  hands  that  could  use  them. 
But  this  age  of  ours,  with  its  eager  engrossment 
in  the  earth-struggle,  cannot  continue  to  do  that. 
The  law  of  industrial  societies  must  become  tech- 
nological —  artistic,  scientific.  The  whole  fabric 
of  the  old  conventional  law  is  weakening,  day  by 
day.  John  Marshall  is  dead.  The  Dartmouth 
College  case  has  been  reversed  by  the  exigencies 
of  economics.  Nothing  in  political  constitutions 
or  corporate  charters  can  keep  us  from  fixing  the 
rates  of  railroads  —  yes,  and  the  salaries  of  their 
managers  —  if  the  mobilization  of  our  working 
forces  seems  to  require  it.  Trades  unions  shall  be 
governed  "  by  injunction,"  or  anyhow,  rather  than 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


that  they  shall  impede  the  circulation  of  the  blood 
of  commerce.  The  local  political  sovereignties 
of  South  Africa,  Burmah,  Corea,  the  Philippines, 
Mexico,  go  down  before  the  invincible  standard  of 
business.  Sometimes  treacherous  and  hypocritical 
have  been  the  hands  that  have  lifted  that  stan- 
dard. The  great  capitalists,  who  dominate  the 
political  cabinets,  have  not  striven  for  the  advance- 
ment of  the  world's  work  so  much  as  for  the 
establishment  of  their  own  privileges.  Yet  it  is 
they  that  have  raised  the  cry  that  nothing,  no  old 
custom,  no  vested  and  immemorial  right,  shall  bar 
the  way  of  an  advancing  civilization.  The  great 
market-men  and  promoters  have  set  the  copy;  and 
it  shall  go  hard  but  the  people  will  better  their 
instruction.  For  not  in  the  interest  of  the  rich 
or  of  the  poor,  the  strong  or  weak,  but  in  the 
interest  of  all  —  the  imperative  law  of  human 
progress  is  rising  up  irresistible,  to  overwhelm 
those  who  rely  upon  vested  rights  and  prescriptive 
titles.  It  is  plainly  to  be  seen  that  the  law  that 
is  destined  to  rule  the  world-wide  circle  of  com- 
merce cannot  be  a  law  invented  by  those  who  sit 
in  councils  and  cabinets;  it  is  to  be  discovered  by 
explorers  and  prospectors,  by  artists  and  engineers 
—  working  out-of-doors. 

The  vast  transformation  that  is  being  wrought 
in  the  spirit  of  politics  requires  that  the  forms 

32 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


and  methods  of  politics  should  also  undergo  a  great 
change.  Political  parties  are  passing  away.  Sectar- 
ian religion  and  partisan  politics  are  complementary 
monstrosities;  it  follows  that  if  one  of  these  is 
lying  in  extremis,  the  other  also  must  be  gasping 
for  breath.  And  so  it  is  in  fact;  the  sectarian 
churches  and  the  political  parties  are  languishing 
together.  But  of  course  they  cannot  pass  out  of 
existence  until  they  are  crowded  by  institutional 
forms  that  are  more  fit  to  hold  the  ground  they 
occupy. 

Regarding,  then,  the  social  problem  from  the 
political  point  of  view,  we  feel  the  need  of  some 
new  political  institution  to  embody  the  new  spirit 
of  law.  There  should  exist  in  every  country  town 
and  city  ward  some  kind  of  a  permanent  political 
primary  to  focalize  the  demand  of  the  people 
for  the  new  kind  of  law.  It  is  toward  the  crea- 
tion of  such  an  institution  that  the  lines  of  Amer- 
ican politics  are  now  running. 

Political  parties  have  never  aimed  directly  at 
the  things  men  really  care  about;  they  have  been 
curiously  circuitous.  They  have  never  struck  hard 
and  forthright  for  better  food,  clothes,  and  houses 
and  the  chance  for  a  freer  and  more  effective  life. 
They  have  never  gone  to  the  point,  but  have 
always  sunk  the  end  in  the  means.  The  party 
managers  have  said:  "Give  us  power;  and  then 

33 


THE    UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


we  will  do  good."  But  they  have  gambled  away 
the  goods  in  pursuit  of  the  power.  The  true 
aim  of  politics  is  to  secure  the  mastery  of  mate- 
rials under  the  hand  of  the  human  ideal.  But  party 
politics  seduce  the  people  from  this  aim,  to  an 
internecine  struggle  for  the  subjection  of  one  an- 
other. Every  practical  advantage  for  the  earth- 
wrestle  is  systematically  sacrificed  to  the  hope  of 
domination.  The  partisan  programmes  for  social 
melioration  are  designedly  tenuous  and  theoretic; 
for  only  thus  can  they  spread  their  spell  over  wide 
areas  and  successfully  appeal  to  the  vague  ideal- 
ism of  great  masses.  There  is  nothing  so  im- 
practical as  "  practical  politics."  For  a  programme 
is  less  and  less  practicable  in  proportion  to  the 
number  of  people  that  must  be  got  to  agree  upon 
it;  and  a  political  economy  that  can  do  nothing 
until  it  has  got  a  majority  of  ninety  millions  to 
think  alike  has  reached  the  vanishing-point  of 
chimeras;  it  is  no  economy  at  all. 

For  example,  politicians  nowadays  are  crying: 
"  Let  us,  bye  and  bye,  revise  the  tariff;  "  and  other 
politicians  are  crying:  "  Let  us  '  stand  pat/  '  As 
a  matter  of  party  politics,  the  issue  thus  framed  is 
all  that  could  be  desired.  It  is  exactly  suited  to 
the  exigencies  of  the  struggle  for  political  power 
—  for  the  domination  of  the  minority  by  the 
majority.  There  is  in  it  the  indespensable  refer- 

34 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


ence  to  grandiose  philosophic  generalizations, 
without  which  it  is  impossible  to  stir  the  stagnant 
rnoralism  of  the  mass-man.  The  pure  Catholicism 
of  "  free  trade  "  is  set  against  the  passionate  pro- 
testantism of  "  protection."  But  this  battle  of 
the  Titans  is  thrust  skillfully  into  the  background, 
to  be  seen  dimly  through  a  haze —  a  fabulous  con- 
test, going  on  forever.  In  the  foreground  is  a  very 
absorbing  scrimmage  for  personal  and  sectional 
privilege.  This  monogram  of  dim  idealism  and 
crass  egotism  is  the  signature  of  party  politics; 
there  is  none  genuine  without  it. 

The  point  here  is  missed  if  one  supposes  that 
the  indirection  and  baseness  are  due  to  the  cor- 
ruption of  parties;  they  inhere  in  the  nature  of 
parties.  The  pursuit  of  political  power  is  neces- 
sarily hypocritical,  since  parties  cannot  live  other- 
wise than  by  preferring  political  power  to  the 
serviceable  control  of  nature.  Genuine  political 
economy  is  not  in  them,  simply  because  political 
economy  aims  at  the  subjection  of  nature  by  men 
in  the  mass,  and  not  at  the  domination  of  one 
class  over  another. 

The  rise  and  fall  of  party  politics  is  only  an 
episode  in  American  history.  It  must  be  remem- 
bered that  the  local  caucus  and  convention  system 
was  unimagined  before  the  days  of  Andrew  Jack- 
son. It  met  the  general  conditions  of  a  crude  and 

35 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


ill-balanced  social  state,  a  society  in  which  the 
mental  atmosphere  throughout  was  charged  with 
the  wildest  idealism  and  the  coarsest  egotism.  The 
psychology  of  party  politics  is,  as  has  been  sug- 
gested, identical  with  that  of  sectarian  religion; 
and  the  great  political  parties  in  America 
have  been  in  effect  religious  sects,  filled  with 
the  fanaticism  and  hypocrisy  of  professional 
piety. 

Popular  government  does  indeed  require  the 
political  organization  of  the  mass  of  the  people; 
but  the  parties  have  accomplished  this  organiza- 
tion in  a  manner  that  is  seen  to  be  completely 
abortive,  since  they  have  afforded  promotion  and 
a  career  not  to  those  who  serve  the  public,  but  to 
the  servants  of  the  party  machine.  The  true  type 
of  popular  political  organization  is  an  association 
of  the  people  of  a  municipality  to  raise  the  stan- 
dard of  living  in  that  place.  It  should  have  a 
structural  shape  as  definite  and  highly  differen- 
tiated as  that  of  Tammany  Hall  or  a  parish  of  the 
mediaeval  Church,  and  should  devote  itself  un- 
dividedly  to  the  business  of  bringing  men  into 
more  stimulating  and  nourishing  relations  to  the 
natural  world.  But,  as  has  been  said,  the  paths  of 
current  religious  and  educational  development  are 
running  to  the  same  issues  as  those  of  politics. 
The  all-the-year-' round  political  primary  which 

36 


WHAT   IS   GOVERNMENT   FOR? 


shall  at  length  show  the  true,  well-nucleated  germ- 
cell  of  democratic  industrial  society  must  be  not 
merely  political ;  it  must  have  a  religious  and  edu- 
cational character  also  —  as  will  be  indicated  in 
the  two  succeeding  chapters. 


37 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


IV 

WHAT  IS  THE  MISSION  OF 
THE  CHURCH? 


says  Thomas 

elusive  privilege  of  forming  general  the- 
ories. But  this  privilege  is  alloyed  by  another,  that 
is,  the  privilege  of  absurdity  —  to  which  no  living 
creature  is  subject  but  man  only." 

What  could  be  more  absurd  than  the  theory 
that  the  Church  of  the  Incarnation  should  shut 
itself  up  in  an  exclusive  idealism,  and  should  have 
nothing  to  do  with  the  real  world  and  its  social 
problem?  That  such  an  idea  should  be  generally 
entertained  in  the  sectarian  religious  establish- 
ments is  proof  enough  that  they  have  drifted  out 
of  the  stream  of  the  Church's  world-moving  and 
eventful  life  and  that  they  have  saved  to  them- 
selves little  of  the  substance  along  with  the  vocab- 
ulary of  historical  Christianity. 

The  Church  of  history  has  everything  to  do 
with  the  social  problem.  Its  amazing  and  mag- 
nificent career  is  not  at  all  intelligible  when  it  is 
considered  otherwise  than  as  an  attempt,  on  the 

38 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCHES   MISSION? 

whole  successful,  to  supersede  the  old  empires 
by  a  new  and  revolutionary  social  order.  The 
character  of  the  revolution  may  be  defined  by  the 
statement  that  under  the  old  regime  a  man's  prac- 
tical power  is  determined  by  his  social  and  legal 
standing,  while  under  the  new  regime  these  con- 
ditions are  reversed.  Of  old  a  man's  place  in  so- 
ciety determined  what  he  could  do ;  the  revolution 
consists  in  so  reversing  the  grain  of  social  law  that 
what  a  man  can  do  shall  determine  his  social  place. 

"  The  princes  of  the  Gentiles  lord  it  over  them, 
but  it  shall  not  be  so  among  you.  For  the  chief 
men  among  you  shall  be  they  that  are  servants 
of  all."  This  comes  nearer  the  point  than  the 
"  Declaration  of  the  Rights  of  Man,"  or  any 
other  historical  document  of  political  revolt.  For 
the  gist  of  modern  industrial  democracy  is  the 
rule  of  the  servants,  the  yielding  of  precedence 
to  those  only  who  can  "  deliver  the  goods."  To 
be  sure,  this  rule  is  as  yet  nowhere  fairly  estab- 
lished. But  when  once  it  shall  be  established,  it 
cannot  be  overthrown;  the  gates  of  hell  shall  not 
prevail  against  it. 

The  states  of  the  old  order  are  destroyed  by 
suicide;  they  constantly  court  death  in  the  conflict 
that  they  invite  between  natural  and  legal  power. 
The  real  sovereign,  always  and  everywhere,  is  the 
economic  power,  and  all  social  collisions  take  place 

39 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


through  the  turning  of  this  power  against  itself. 
The  power  of  the  purse  falls  into  the  hands  of 
those  that  cannot  hold  the  plow;  the  economic 
power  that  is  merely  documentary  finds  itself  at 
war  with  the  economic  power  that  is  real.  Such 
is  the  contradiction  that  follows  upon  the  attempt 
to  set  up  any  other  rule  than  that  of  productive 
efficiency. 

It  is  written  that  "  the  meek  shall  inherit  the 
earth."  Is  it  not  plain  that  the  meekness  intended 
is  that  of  mechanics,  chemists,  and  artists  who  mind 
well  their  own  business;  and  is  it  not  clear  that 
they  are  really  destined  to  prevail  over  the  self- 
assertive  people  who  push  and  pull  for  social  status  ? 

How  else  can  we  hope  ever  to  achieve  a  stable 
social  equilibrium  than  by  the  identification  of 
our  working  force  with  our  police  power.  So 
long  as  these  are  two  distinct  and  separate  things, 
they  will  fight;  and  the  course  of  every  national 
career  will  run  to  a  dead-lock.  The  enduring,  the 
eternal  city  is  the  city  whose  fundamental  law  is 
industrial  law,  a  law  drawn  with  a  view  to  the  pro- 
duction of  the  greatest  possible  quantity  and  the 
best  possible  quality  of  human  values.  Of  such 
a  city  it  may  be  said  that  its  foundations  are  un- 
shakable. It  is  at  peace  with  elemental  nature. 
The  laws  of  life  are  its  gendarmerie  to  "  arrest 
its  knaves  and  dastards." 

40 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCH'S   MISSION? 

The  mission  of  the  Church  is  to  restore  the 
world  to  the  original  and  normal  conditions  of 
cosmic  evolution.  Its  method  is  the  setting  up 
in  every  community  of  an  institution  dedicated 
to  the  future  —  i.  e.y  to  progress.  This  is  the 
only  institution  that  cannot  be  invalidated  by  lapse 
of  time.  For  it  is  to  be  observed  that  institutions 
have  their  day  and  pass  because  they  are  static; 
while  all  the  world  is  by  its  very  nature  in  per- 
petual flux.  They  perish  because  the  spirit  of 
progress  is  not  in  them.  But  when  progress  itself 
becomes  institutionalized,  the  institution  is  eternal. 
And  such  an  institution  is  the  Church  —  in  its  es- 
sential idea. 

The  State  dies  because  it  is  a  state;  it  dies  of 
static  law.  It  attempts  to  erect  in  this  fluent, 
growing  world  a  permanent  establishment  aloof 
from  nature.  The  incurable  vice  of  the  State 
lies  in  the  idea  of  the  sovereignty  of  majorities  — 
the  idea  of  an  unquestionable  authority  that  is 
other  than  the  authority  of  the  working-will,  the 
competent  power  to  do  good.  Says  Guizot  in 
his  "History  of  Civilization":  "This  idea  of 
sovereignty  —  whether  the  authority  be  lodged  in 
one,  in  a  few,  in  a  majority,  or  in  all- — is  an 
iniquitous  lie."  For  the  law  that  is  the  real  basis 
of  human  society  is  written  in  the  indelible  char- 
acters of  humanity  as  it  relates  itself  to  the  ele- 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


mental  world.  It  does  not  depend  upon  the  con- 
course of  opinions.  It  is  only  superficially  true 
that  "  governments  derive  their  just  powers  from 
the  consent  of  the  governed."  For  justice  is  not 
to  be  deduced  from  the  terms  of  a  contract.  Its 
kingdom  is  not  of  toute  le  monde.  Whatever 
inures  to  the  advancement  of  civilization  is  just, 
though  all  the  returns  from  the  polling-places 
should  record  a  mandate  for  barbarism.  Such  is 
the  orthodox  doctrine  of  the  true  Church. 

But  the  Church  does  not  raise  a  red  flag  against 
the  empire  or  against  imperial  democracies;  that 
is  not  its  way.  It  hates  imperialism,  which  is  the 
socialism  of  the  rich;  but  it  hates  also  socialism, 
the  imperialism  of  the  poor.  Its  way  is  to  set  up 
its  standard  in  every  community,  as  a  new  polarity 
of  social  organization,  and  to  nurture  there  the 
organic  filaments  of  the  new  order.  It  "  wrestles 
not  against  flesh  and  blood";  it  is  not  the  enemy 
of  those  in  power.  It  perceives  that  the  real  seat 
of  imperialism  is  in  the  mob-heart  of  the  multitude. 

The  enemy  of  the  Church  is  sin.  And  what  is 
sin?  At  bottom  it  is  disbelief.  In  what?  In  the 
practicability  of  one's  own  human  ideal.  Sin  is, 
by  etymology,  a  split,  a  schism;  it  is  the  breach 
that  is  wrought  in  a  man's  own  nature  when  he 
dares  not  venture  to  believe  that  the  ideal  —  the 
imperative  law  of  his  inner  constitution  —  can 

42 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCHES   MISSION? 

make  itself  at  home  in  the  real  world,  dares  not 
believe  that  the  materials  of  science  are  plastic 
under  the  hand  of  art.  Thenceforth  he  is  no 
longer  a  whole  man  (holy?  how  wise  are  the  sug- 
gestions of  radical  and  primitive  words!),  no 
longer  sane  (a  saint,  shall  we  say?),  for  a  great 
flaw  or  fault  has  cut  across  his  soul.  There  is 
begotten  a  fateful  lesion,  a  breach  of  continuity 
between  his  instincts  and  his  intellect.  The  divine 
and  elemental  passion  in  him,  balked  of  its  healthy 
issue  in  creative  work,  wears  with  destructive 
friction  against  the  frame  of  his  ordered  knowl- 
edge. It  bursts  into  a  consuming  flame  to  destroy 
his  consciousness,  his  will,  his  very  life.  Such 
is  the  story  of  the  spiritual  experts,  the  doctors 
of  conscience,  the  great  confessors.  And  this  is 
sin.  It  is  not  the  doing  or  leaving  undone  of  this 
or  that  that  conventional  morality  enjoins.  It  is 
spiritual  death  engendered  by  unfaith.  And  man 
is  to  be  "  saved  "  not  by  morality,  but  by  religion 
—  the  heartening  of  his  own  heart.  He  was  con- 
demned to  drudgery  and  death  not  for  his  poetry, 
but  for  his  desperate  prose ;  not  for  his  adventure, 
but  for  his  cautious  fear.  Adam,  in  the  old  He- 
brew story,  dared  not  dress  and  keep  the  garden 
under  the  naive  guidance  of  his  own  spirit;  he 
shrank  from  the  adventure  of  life,  and  would  know 
first  what  the  authorities  would  approve.  His  in- 

43 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


stincts  cowered  before  his  intellect;  so  he  ate  of  the 
"  tree  of  knowledge  of  good  and  evil."  Thus  for 
him  art  was  turned  to  weariness  and  toil.  It  is  a 
great  symbol,  and  an  epitome  of  all  history.  The 
Church  was  right  in  saying  that  the  sin  of  Adam 
has  corrupted  the  whole  world.  For  there  is  noth- 
ing the  matter  with  the  world  but  this,  that  every- 
where the  heart  is  in  bondage  to  the  head  —  every- 
where the  creative  imagination  of  men  lies  under 
the  thralldom  of  dead  memories. 

The  next  man  one  meets  in  the  streets  will  be 
seen  to  be  living  two  lives,  and  between  these  two 
lives  there  is  no  communion.  His  will  is  utterly 
divided  and  he  becomes  by  turns,  in  all  possible 
sincerity,  optimist  and  pessimist,  egotist  and  al- 
truist, a  devout  patriot  ready  to  die  for  his 
country,  and  a  devourer  of  widows'  houses.  So 
universal  is  the  truth  in  Robert  Louis  Steven- 
son's dreadful  story  of  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr. 
Hyde. 

The  Church  is  not  to  be  identified  with  any 
ecclesiastical  system  that  has  as  yet  appeared;  yet 
it  reaches  ever  forward  to  embody  itself  in  solid 
and  structural  forms.  The  Protestants  are  right, 
and  the  Catholics  are  also  right;  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  is  a  spiritual  kingdom,  whose  throne  is  in 
the  private  heart,  and  yet  it  can  never  rest  until 
it  has  become  a  territorial  institution,  commanding 

44 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCHES    MISSION? 

the  forum  and  the  market-place  with  visible  and 
unquestionable  sway. 

The  mediaeval  Church  was  a  great  political 
and  social  achievement.  It  did  not  limit  its  aim 
to  the  propagation  of  a  religious  cult;  its  cathe- 
drals were  not  merely  places  of  worship.  They 
were  public  schools,  guild-halls  and  court-houses, 
and  they  were  the  most  impressive  monuments  of 
successful  art  and  science  that  the  world  has  yet 
seen.  At  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century 
the  social-revolutionary  idea  of  the  Church  had 
been  carried  as  far  as  it  could  go  under  the  auspices 
of  priests  and  professional  religious  persons.  For 
essential  religion,  in  realizing  itself,  necessarily 
destroys  the  institutions  of  professional  piety. 
This  is  so  because  it  is  impossible  for  integrated 
minds  to  think  of  religion  as  a  thing  standing  apart 
by  itself;  it  transfuses  the  whole  of  life. 

The  inner  meaning  of  the  Reformation  was  the 
descent  of  the  world-renewing  spirit  of  Chris- 
tianity from  the  high  altars  to  the  open  road  and 
the  market-square.  Thenceforth  the  young  up- 
springing  nations  became  the  defenders  of  the 
Faith.  Secular  society,  in  its  implicit,  unrealized 
design,  became  the  true  continuator  of  the  historic 
Church.  It  took  upon  itself  the  Church's  offices 
—  equity  jurisprudence,  public  education,  the 
charge  of  hospitals  and  alms-houses  —  and  it  be- 

45 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


came  the  vehicle  of  the  Church's  spiritual  tradition, 
bearing  the  burden  and  message  of  liberty,  equality 
and  fraternity. 

What  is  the  matter  with  the  sectarian  churches 
in  the  United  States?  The  matter  is  that  they 
have  little  or  nothing  to  do  with  the  Church  of 
history.  They  have  been  thrust  summarily  out  of 
the  field  of  our  secular  order  and  have  been  for- 
bidden to  meddle  with  its  concerns  —  notwith- 
standing the  fact  that  these  concerns  are  the  real 
concerns  of  historical  Christianity.  There  is  a 
current  illusion  that  Protestant  churches  have  vol- 
untarily and  in  obedience  to  their  own  inner  law 
renounced  "  temporal  power  "  and  territorial  jur- 
isdiction. The  facts  of  history  do  not  support 
that  theory.  The  truth  is  that  modern  democratic 
society  has  everywhere  driven  the  churches  out  of 
its  forum.  And  the  deeper  fact  is  that  the  sec- 
tarian churches  are  not  properly  churches  at  all, 
but  spiritualistic  cults  not  different  in  motive  or 
social  function  from  those  cults  of  Orpheus,  Eleusis 
or  Mithras  that  flourished  in  the  old  and  decaying 
Mediterranean  world.  They  minister  to  the  heart- 
sickness,  the  nostalgia  of  those  who  have  been 
spiritually  dislocated  by  the  social  contortions  of 
a  dying  order ;  and  who  dare  not  make  a  practical 
adventure  of  their  hopes  for  the  renewing  of  the 
world.  They  are  refuges,  not  of  faith,  but  of  un- 

46 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCHES   MISSION? 

faith.  Their  profound  esoterism,  their  shadowy 
other-worldliness  is  a  secret  apostasy  from  the 
task  of  life.  The  vast  prevalence  of  these  cults 
in  the  United  States  is  a  sign  of  the  weakness  of 
our  idealism  as  a  working  force.  We  are  rapt 
mystics  because  we  are  gross  materialists.  The 
brutality  of  our  actual  commerce  yields  so  little 
for  the  soul  to  feed  upon  that  we  turn  wistfully  to 
sacraments  and  tales  of  miracle.  It  was  so  with 
those  who  thronged  the  altars  of  the  Eleusinian 
mysteries. 

Of  course  the  Church,  even  in  its  best  estate, 
always  had  house-room  for  this  wistful  and  pa- 
thetic faithlessness.  But  in  the  great  days  this 
was  not  the  life  of  the  Church;  it  was  the  burden 
laid  upon  its  life.  The  Church  had  something 
else  —  an  enterprising  and  world-compelling  faith. 
And  the  point  here  is  that  that  confident  missionary 
enterprise  passed,  at  the  Reformation,  into  the 
body  of  secular  society,  leaving  the  modern  re- 
ligious cults  to  be  the  inheritors  not  of  the  Church's 
faith,  but  only  of  its  abandoned  fears. 

It  is  to  be  admitted  that  even  to-day  and  in  the 
United  States  the  sects  draw  powerfully  upon 
what  is  wholesomest  in  the  community  —  its  youth, 
its  real  faith.  Such  is  the  magic  of  great  historic 
names  and  symbols.  But  neither  youth  nor  faith 
can  by  any  means  prevail  in  the  councils  of  eccle- 

47 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


siastics.  There  is  a  fatality  that  determines  other- 
wise. There  is  that  in  the  set  and  grain  of  the 
sectarian  corporations — in  their  historical  mo- 
mentum—  that  makes  it  impossible  for  them  to 
bear  upon  real  issues  and  the  building  of  the  cities. 
It  is  nobody's  fault;  and  it  is  as  vain  to  chide  the 
bishop  as  to  blame  the  verger.  The  path  of  the 
mediaeval  Church  ran  toward  the  centre  of  civic 
life;  the  paths  of  the  sectarian  corporations  of 
our  day  trend  away  from  that  centre.  And  it  is 
foolhardy  for  reforming  clergymen  or  laymen 
to  run  counter  to  a  fact  of  such  magnitude;  indi- 
viduals can  make  history  only  by  obeying  its  laws. 
The  impracticability  of  the  sectarian  churches 
is  their  raison  d'etre;  if  they  had  any  considerable 
bearing  upon  business  and  the  work-a-day  world, 
they  would  lose  their  support  and  would  cease  to 
exist.  Men  of  affairs  feel  their  souls  crushed  in 
the  vast  machine  of  modern  business  and  they 
hunger  and  thirst  for  a  realm  of  utterly  abstract 
idealism  —  to  redress  the  balance  of  their  morbid 
lives.  That  is  why  they  pay  their  money  to  main- 
tain the  super-sensuous  rituals  and  the  miraculous, 
unearthly  dogmas.  To  be  sure,  it  is  not  true  and 
never  has  been  true  that  the  privileged  classes  pay 
the  mystagogues,  of  set  and  contractual  purpose, 
in  order  that  the  mystagogues  may  deceive  the 
people  and  so  maintain  the  iniquities  of  privilege. 

48 


WHAT   IS   THE   CHURCH'S   MISSION? 

Human  nature  has  never  been  so  mean  as  that. 
But  it  is  true  that  the  institutions  of  supernatur- 
alism  are  begotten  of  the  faithless  sordidness  of 
men's  lives  and  that  they  react  to  perpetuate  that 
sordidness. 

The  logic  of  the  situation  in  America  is  that 
those  who  have  some  appreciation  of  the  social 
mission  of  the  Church  in  history  would  be  wise  to 
abandon  the  thought  of  making  the  sectarian  cor- 
porations the  agents  of  that  mission.  Such  per- 
sons should  cease  to  be  sectarians  themselves  and 
should  withhold  their  support  from  all  forms  of 
sectarianism.  The  true  life  of  the  Church  is  to 
be  found  in  the  body  of  secular  society.  The  day 
is  past  for  the  organization  of  religious  society  in 
aloofness  from  the  secular  order.  The  present 
work  of  the  Church  is  to  organize  secular  society 
on  a  religious  basis;  i.  e.,  to  bring  our  democratic 
communities  to  understand  that  their  real  consti- 
tutional law  is  an  eternal,  an  unconventional  law  — 
a  law  that  is  grounded  in  the  moral  order  of  the 
universe. 

There  is  in  the  American  people  a  dumb  con- 
viction of  high  spiritual  destiny  —  a  feeling  that 
we  are  the  trustees  of  an  order  that  is  to  be  per- 
manent and  of  universal  validity.  This  convic- 
tion cries  now  to  be  defined  and  articulated.  If 
the  heretics  who  are  being  driven  out  of  the  sec- 

49 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


tarian  churches  would  not  look  back,  if  they  would 
resolutely  put  their  hands  to  the  work  of  building 
the  institution  of  religion  in  the  middle  of  the 
market-place,  they  would  find  there  the  people 
and  a  sufficient  store  of  materials.  They  would 
have  the  material  support  that  it  is  impossible  for 
an  enterprising  faith  to  find  in  the  cults  of  a  tran- 
scendental goodness. 

The  next  chapter  will  venture  to  forecast  the 
tangible  form  of  the  church  of  the  religion  of 
democracy,  and  to  suggest  something  of  the  vo- 
cabulary of  which  it  is  likely  to  make  use. 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


V 
WHAT  IS  A   SCHOOL? 

IT  is  common  for  American  fathers  to  say,  "  I 
send  my  boy  to  school  in  order  that  he  may 
have  a  better  chance  in  life  than  I  had."  Thought- 
less people  with  an  old-world  bias  still  suppose 
that  the  schools  exist  to  bring  up  the  rising  gen- 
eration to  the  level  of  that  which  is  passing  —  to 
make  the  children  like  their  parents.  But  your 
genuine  American  knows  better.  He  knows  that 
in  this  country  the  schools  exist  not  to  make  the 
children  like  their  parents,  but  to  make  them  dif- 
ferent—  and  to  make  the  children's  world  differ- 
ent from  the  world  of  their  fathers.  The  Ameri- 
can public  school  is  a  tremendous  enterprise  in 
social  regeneration.  Spite  of  all  the  blare  of  our 
trumpets,  our  grown-folk  are  dissatisfied  both 
with  their  own  achievements  and  with  the  con- 
ditions of  life  as  they  have  found  them.  And  their 
vast  sacrifice  in  order  that  the  children  "  may 
have  a  better  chance  "  is  the  age's  Grail-quest  and 
martyrdom,  its  man-endearing  auto  da  fe.  There  is 
nothing  greater  in  our  actual  social  order  than  this 
grim  resolution  to  supersede  it  by  something  better. 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


Of  old  it  was  fabled  that  the  god  Chronos  ate 
his  children,  but  our  Father  Time  gives  his  flesh 
as  broken  bread  to  his  offspring,  that  they  may 
go  in  the  strength  of  that  meat  to  the  building  of 
a  city  that  shall  outlast  Time.  The  feudal  ages 
built  cathedrals  and  went  on  pilgrimages  to  holy 
graves;  America  went  on  pioneering  pilgrimages 
and  built  public  schools.  In  those  unsung  crusades 
which  in  the  last  century  flung  out  their  faith 
against  the  wilderness,  advancing  steadily  from 
meridian  to  meridian — a  sweeping  line  of  out- 
posts —  wherever  the  prairie  schooner  stopped, 
the  pilgrims  built  a  school-house.  As  has  been 
said,  it  was  not  that  they  cared  overweeningly  for 
books  and  pedagogues.  But  they  could  not  raise 
up  shrines  to  the  Virgin  and  saints  as  the  old 
crusaders  did,  and  so  they  built  schools  —  out 
of  logs  or  sods  or  adobe  bricks  —  as  votive-offer- 
ings to  the  God  of  the  religion  of  democracy,  and 
witnesses  to  their  faith  that  there  in  nothing  in 
the  mountains  or  the  desert  that  is  not  tamable 
under  the  hand  of  the  ideal. 

All  Americans  are  millennialists,  after  a  fashion. 
We  believe  in  the  visible  coming  of  the  kingdom; 
and  the  public  school  is  the  bone  and  tissue  of  the 
new  order,  growing  in  the  womb  of  the  old.  The 
point  is  that  the  educational  principle  as  we  un- 
derstand it  is  identical  with  the  evolutionary 

52 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


principle.  The  public  school  system  is  rightly 
conceived  of  as  the  adumbration  of  a  new  civil 
polity,  one  framed  not  to  keep  things  fixed,  but 
to  keep  things  moving.  Or  say  rather  that  the 
new  polity  is  to  be  a  living  body  framed  to  grow. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  political  order  under  which 
we  are  now  trying  to  live  cannot  be  regarded  as 
a  mobilization  for  the  march  of  democracy,  but 
rather  as  a  cunningly  devised  system  of  checks 
and  disciplines  to  keep  us  from  beating  a  panic 
retreat  to  feudalism. 

Probably  the  socially  regenerative  character  of 
schools  has  always  and  in  all  lands  been  more  or 
less  faintly  realized,  although  it  has  been  left  for 
America  to  bring  the  feeling  into  clear  conscious- 
ness. In  the  great  imperial  schools  of  Rome,  it 
seems  indeed  that  Time  devoured  his  children 
without  wincing  and  the  Past  lorded  it  frankly 
over  the  Future;  but  who  will  say  just  that  of 
the  Academy  at  Athens,  or  of  Hypatia's  school, 
or  Abelard's?  Would  men  anywhere  ever  have 
thought  of  such  a  thing  as  the  making  of  a  school 
—  the  creation  of  a  little  artificial  world  for  their 
children  to  take  breath  and  grow  up  in  —  had 
they  not  secretly  repudiated  the  law  and  order 
of  their  own  living?  May  we  not  set  it  down 
as  a  first  principle  in  pedagogics  that  the  best 
education  for  a  child  would  be  to  think  and 

53 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


pray  with  his  own  mother  and  work  in  his 
father's  shop — if  only  the  men  and  women  of 
the  world  could  think  straight  and  work  straight? 
It  is  because  the  workers  of  the  world  have 
not  been  able  to  think  and  the  thinkers  have 
not  been  able  to  work  out  their  thoughts,  that 
they  have  sent  their  children  into  a  little  fenced 
place  apart  from  the  turmoil  of  life  —  a  place 
open  to  the  earth  and  the  sky  —  in  the  cease- 
less hope  that  they  might  there  knit  up  the  rav- 
elled edges  of  existence  and  make  a  new  beginning 
for  humanity. 

To-day  in  the  United  States  you  send  your  boy 
to  school  in  the  hope  that  he  may  conceive  ideals 
and  learn  facts  —  and  that  the  former  may  stand 
in  working  relations  with  the  latter.  You  under- 
stand perfectly  well  that  the  distinctive  work  of 
the  school  is  not  the  multiplying  of  ideas  or  the 
multiplying  of  facts,  but  the  reassuring  and  estab- 
lishing of  the  heart  and  head  of  a  youth  so  that 
indomitably  his  heart  and  head  shall  work  together, 
and,  to  the  end  of  his  life,  nothing  shall  loosen 
the  grip  of  what  the  boy  feels  to  be  right  upon 
what  he  knows  to  be  real.  A  good  schooling  con- 
sists in  the  tightening  of  the  hold  of  one's  ideals 
upon  his  facts.  Ideals  can  be  got  out  of  school 
as  well  as  in,  and  facts  can  be  got  better.  But 
in  the  drift  of  ordinary  out-in-the-world  expe- 

54 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


rience  you  cannot  always  get  for  your  boy  this 
heartening  of  the  brain  which  it  is  the  school's 
work  to  give  —  this  innervation  of  the  heart.  And 
the  reason  is  that  the  society  of  grown  men  as 
it  exists  is  abnormal  and  decomposed.  You  would 
not  send  your  boy  to  the  parochial  clergy,  to  the 
working  politicians,  lawyers,  or  newspaper  men,  to 
get  his  primary  lessons  in  the  thinking  of  whole 
thoughts,  because  you  perceive  that  the  out-givings 
of  these  classes  on  life,  duty,  law,  and  judgment 
are  in  general  not  the  real  thoughts  of  living  men, 
but  only  their  professional  traditions.  On  the 
other  hand,  you  can  scarcely  expect  your  son  to 
be  a  creative  artist  or  master  of  materials  if  you 
put  him,  without  preliminary  mental  bracing,  into 
the  office  of  a  working  architect,  engineer,  or  manu- 
facturer; for  his  conceptive  mind  will  be  over- 
whelmed there  and  beaten  flat  by  a  hail  of  in- 
numerable details. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  infer  from  these  reflections 
that  all  our  neighbors  are  mean,  but  only  that  the 
actual  social  constitution  puts  an  excessive  strain 
upon  human  nature.  There  are  social  forces,  forces 
of  disease  and  death,  that  are  not  begotten  of  the 
wills  of  men,  but  rather  of  their  inherited  fears 
and  failures.  Thus  it  happens  that  sometimes  men 
are  gibbeted  in  the  midst  of  universal  pity,  as 
John  Brown  was,  and  probably  most  of  the  Chris- 

55 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


tian  martyrs,  beginning  with  the  First  of  all  —  or 
lifted  to  the  high  places  in  spite  of  universal  dis- 
like, as  many  a  king  has  been  and  many  an  "  avail- 
able "  politician.  In  a  diseased  social  order, 
though  all  men  should  will  the  right,  they  could 
not  perform  it,  because  of  the  deformity  of  their 
institutions  —  since  institutions  are  to  society  what 
feet  and  hands  are  to  the  mind  of  the  individual 
man. 

Our  system  of  education  is  then  the  germ  of  a 
new  order.  It  contains  within  itself  all  the  organs, 
the  institutions  of  a  society  that  shall  be  at  once 
conceptive  and  capable  —  fulfilling  high  designs. 
The  broadest  and  plainest  fact  about  the  history 
of  society  hitherto  is  its  disappointment,  its  re- 
current dead-lock  and  self-destruction.  There  is 
an  important  sense  in  which  one  may  say  that 
social  progress  has  not  yet  fairly  begun.  There 
has  been  no  real  and  important  social  progress 
hitherto  —  only  a  slow  movement  through  the 
difficult  lessons  of  disaster  toward  those  grounds 
of  social  health  upon  which  for  the  first  time  it 
shall  be  possible  to  make  gains  that  cannot  be  lost. 
The  story  of  human  experience  has  not  yet  reached 
the  date  of  the  beginning  of  true  evolutionary  so- 
ciety; it  has  marked  only  the  myriad  phases  of  a 
revolution  —  a  stupendous  shifting  of  the  social 
centre  of  gravity  from  temporal  to  eternal  law  — 

56 


WHAT   IS    A    SCHOOL? 


i.  e.,  from  the  innumerable  constitutions  of  con- 
ventionalism to  the  solid  and  permanent  basis  of 
art  and  science. 

We  have  not  yet  finished  the  revolution,  though 
the  worst,  let  us  hope,  is  past.  Not  yet  have  we 
fully  escaped  from  the  land  of  Utopias,  or  aban- 
doned the  thought  of  establishing  an  unquestion- 
able authority  and  finishing  off  a  perfect  state.  We 
have  not  yet  arrived  upon  the  firm  ground  of  na- 
ture and  cosmic  evolutionary  law.  But  we  should 
take  heart,  for  we  have  made  all  the  stages  of  a 
mighty  spiritual  pilgrimage  from  Stygian  darkness 
and  confusion  of  will  to  the  frontiers  of  a  fair  land 
of  art  and  science  —  the  gates  of  an  imperishable 
civilization. 

The  impracticability  of  the  old  social  systems 
has  shown  itself  always  and  everywhere  by  an  un- 
failing sign,  to  wit:  the  splitting  of  society  into 
two  parts.  A  yawning  wound  has  opened  across 
the  social  body  from  side  to  side  —  dividing  the 
privileged  and  the  oppressed.  On  one  side  stand 
always  the  creditor  class  and  on  the  other  the  class 
of  debtors,  as  if  the  former  had  performed  huge 
works  of  supererogation  and  the  latter  works  of 
dereliction  as  huge.  The  creditor  class  is  always 
the  ruling  class  and  the  debtor  class  is  always 
ruled  over  and  overruled.  The  former  are,  in 
spite  of  all  political  safeguards  and  the  forms  of 

57 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


democracy,  the  makers  and  masters  of  the  law; 
the  latter  are  its  slaves. 

Surely  the  most  considerable  business  of  histori- 
cal and  social  science  is  to  explain  this  prodigious 
phenomenon  —  this  fact  of  universal  social 
schism.  Demagogues,  the  partisans  of  the  poor, 
say  that  the  rich  are  wholly  at  fault;  that  when 
the  poor  complain,  "  the  poor  are  always  in  the 
right."  They  say  that  the  great  ones  in  the  social 
scale  have  meanly  conspired  and  compassed  the 
undoing  of  the  little  ones.  But  there  is  no  clear 
historic  evidence  of  such  a  plot.  A  cabal  may  be 
formed  of  four  or  five  persons,  but  not  of  many 
thousands;  and  we  are  speaking  now  of  the  issue 
between  great  classes. 

No,  the  class-schism  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
men  have  lacked  hitherto  the  artistic-scientific 
temper  in  politics  —  the  mood  of  factful  and  prac- 
tical idealism.  It  is  not  the  "  artistic  tempera- 
ment "  that  is  wanting;  there  has  never  been  any 
lack  of  neurotic  idealism.  Nor  is  it  the  so-called 
"  scientific  spirit,"  for  neither  has  there  been  a 
dearth  of  men  who  have  scared  themselves  out  of 
their  hope  and  their  humanity  by  a  cold  analysis 
of  facts.  The  lack  is  always  of  that  integral  and 
healthy  temper  which  is  at  once  artistic  and  scien- 
tific —  gripping  the  facts  as  they  really  are,  with 
the  hands  of  passion  and  poetry. 

58 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


The  class-schism,  the  social  dead-lock,  the  de- 
generacy, the  death  of  nations,  is  due  to  an  immem- 
orial, a  universally  epidemic  disease  —  an  organic 
breach  between  the  instincts  and  the  intellect.  The 
average  man  is  abnormal,  because  of  the  imperfect 
correlation  between  his  emotional  force  and  his 
knowing  power.  Thus  a  "  great  man  "  is  simply 
a  normal  man.  He  is  regarded  with  open-mouthed 
astonishment  and  admiration  by  the  masses  merely 
because  he  thinks  with  passionate  interest  and  is 
intelligent  in  his  feeling.  He  thinks  with  emotion 
and  feels  with  discretion. 

If  social  reformers  generally  fail  to  ease  their 
groaning  patient,  it  is  because  they  start  out  with 
a  false  diagnosis  of  the  disease.  Commonly  they 
are  divided  into  two  classes  —  those  whose  role 
it  is  to  endeavor  to  make  people  feel  more  acutely, 
and  those  who  set  out  to  make  them  think  harder. 
Neither  of  these  classes  can  do  any  vital  or  per- 
manent good,  because,  with  reference  to  their  vital 
strength,  the  mass  of  men  think  and  feel  already 
exactly  as  much  as  they  can  stand.  The  evangel- 
ists of  emotion  are  under  the  illusion  that  there 
is  a  shortage  of  sympathy  in  the  world.  They 
suppose  that  love,  brotherhood,  altruism,  if  it 
could  only  be  reinforced  in  some  manner  so  as  to 
beat  down  the  cool  hard-headedness  of  mankind, 
would  solve  all  problems.  They  forget  that  for 

59 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


one  human  being  to  care  after  his  own  fashion 
for  another  is  as  inevitable  as  eating,  and  as  little 
susceptible  to  external  force.  The  apostles  of 
brain-stimulus,  on  the  other  hand,  are  fixedly  sure 
that  if  they  could  only  get  into  people's  heads  some 
certain  exact  demonstration  —  as  George's  single- 
tax  thesis  or  Marx's  theory  of  value  —  then  all 
would  be  well.  It  is  as  if  one  were  to  suppose 
that  the  age-long  tragedy  of  baffled  and  shattered 
nations  turns  upon  nothing  but  a  mistake  in  arith- 
metic. 

The  power  to  think  and  the  power  to  feel  are 
correlative;  you  cannot  increase  the  one  without 
increasing  the  other.  And  if  men  think  obtusely 
and  feel  basely,  it  is  not  good  for  them  that  they 
should  be  driven  to  and  fro  between  warm  senti- 
mentalism  and  cold  logic.  Such  a  regimen  serves 
only  to  weaken  the  will  and  to  slow  the  pulse  both 
of  thought  and  feeling. 

What  we  need  is  to  pull  ourselves  together. 
A  man  is  sane  and  strong  because  of  the  reci- 
procity of  his  instinct  and  his  intellect.  And  it  is 
true  as  the  Newtonian  formula  of  gravitation  that 
the  energy  of  the  will  diminishes  with  the  square 
of  the  distance  between  the  emotional  centre  of 
a  man's  life  and  his  brain-focus.  Even  so,  a  so- 
ciety is  weak-willed  and  incompetent  in  the  degree 
that  its  religion  is  diverse  from  its  politics. 

60 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


Now  the  university  undertakes  to  heal  the  social 
disease  by  making  idealism  practical  and  business 
artistic.  Its  mission  is  to  reintegrate  the  dissevered 
faculties  of  life.  With  one  hand  it  grasps  the 
things  of  science  and  with  the  other  it  lays  hold 
of  the  humanities  and  the  arts.  It  would  create 
in  every  neighborhood  a  milieu  of  living  romance, 
of  enterprising  love. 


It  is  related  somewhere  that  a  dozen  young 
college  men  —  at  Harvard,  or  Yale  perhaps  — 
sat  together  in  the  afterglow  of  their  commence- 
ment day,  planning  their  generous  careers.  They 
would  carry  out  into  the  world  the  spirit  of  the 
university  —  its  realism,  its  idealism.  They  would 
not  capitulate  to  the  "  mooners,"  nor  yet  to  the 
"  muckers."  One  was  for  law,  another  for  medi- 
cine, another  for  trade,  another  was  to  be  a  news- 
paper man,  and  so  on.  They  promised  each  other 
that  they  would  return  to  the  nourishing  academic 
bosom  on  class  day  in  ten  years,  and  would  make 
unglossed  reports  as  to  how  their  fine  ambitions 
had  really  fared.  The  ten  years  slipped  by,  and 
then,  as  the  story  goes,  they  did  indeed  come  back. 
But,  alas !  it  was  not  as  triumphant  paladins  and 
dragon-slayers.  The  university  spirit,  they  con- 
fessed it,  had  gone  clean  out  of  them.  They  had 

61 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


capitulated  to  the  half-gods,  one  and  all.  The 
lawyer  acknowledged  with  pangs  that  his  enthu- 
siasm for  justice,  his  passion  for  "  the  perfection 
of  human  reason,"  had  grown  cold  and  documen- 
tary; he  was  attorney  for  a  municipal  gas  com- 
pany, and  was  too  busy  finding  reasons  to  sustain 
its  franchises.  The  physician,  fronted  by  the  re- 
minders of  his  youthful  faith,  confessed  with  shame 
that  he  was  no  chevalier  of  immortal  health,  but 
only  the  pampered  servant  of  rich  and  valetudin- 
arian ladies.  The  trader  had  given  up  his  ideas 
about  lowering  the  labor-cost  of  the  necessaries 
of  life,  and  admitted  that  he  thought  of  nothing 
in  business  hours  save  how  to  rule  the  market 
for  his  goods  and  acquire  a  taxing-power  over  the 
people  that  needed  them.  As  for  the  newspaper 
man,  he  hastened  to  say  with  self-scorn  that  his 
paper  was  edited  by  the  large  advertisers  of  the  de- 
partment stores.  And  so  it  went  on  from  apostate 
man  to  man,  until  the  tale  of  twelve  Judases  was 
complete.  A  dozen  shame-faced  betrayers  of  civ- 
ilization sat  and  looked  out  through  their  tobacco 
smoke  over  the  quadrangle  of  the  sacred  Muses, 
and  felt  bitterly  that  they  were  no  masters  of  arts 
at  all  —  save  apish,  feline  arts;  that  they  had 
outraged  science  and  the  humanities.  Thereupon, 
it  is  said,  they  drew  pitifully  near  together  in  a 
gentle  bond  and  communion  of  humiliation.  And 

62 


WHAT   IS   A   SCHOOL? 


then  suddenly  their  hearts  lightened.  They  arose 
up  resolutely  and  said  to  one  another:  "  We  have 
not  yet  had  team-play!  Let  us  go  out  together 
and  try  again!  It  has  been  plainly  shown  that 
there  is  no  one  of  us  who  is  not  too  weak  to  go 
alone.  Let  us  go  together  to  some  prairie  town 
and  build  a  house  as  a  shrine  of  the  nameless  faith 
of  science  —  something  solid  and  visible  to  remind 
us,  and  to  fix  our  wandering,  feeble  wills.  And  let 
us  work  and  play  in  that  town  —  bargain,  print, 
plead  and  practice  medicine  —  as  children  of  the 
light  and  of  the  day;  and  see  whether  we  may  not 
do  a  stint  or  two  for  civilization.  Or,  if  that  be 
withholden  from  us,  Heaven  grant  that  we  may 
at  least  lift  the  incubus  of  our  sodden,  expensive 
lives  off  the  groaning  Car." 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


VI 
THE  INSTITUTIONAL  PRINCIPLE 

f  I  A  HE  artistic-scientific  spirit  is  at  home  in  the 
JL  United  States;  it  actuates  a  million  private 
lives.  The  late  Prof.  William  James,  of  Harvard 
University,  made  a  systematic  exposition  of  the 
implications  of  this  spirit  — -  this  attitude  toward 
life.  He  called  it  philosophical  Pragmatism, 
meaning  about  the  same  thing  that  has  been  de- 
scribed here  as  the  original  and  essential  spirit 
of  the  university.  Call  it  by  what  name  we  will, 
this  impatience  of  all  religious  and  legal  dogmas, 
this  idealistic  practicality,  steadfastly  determined 
to  judge  every  tree  by  its  fruits,  every  man  by  his 
ability  to  "  deliver  the  goods,"  is  the  very  genius 
of  America,  the  esoteric  religion  and  politics  of 
its  representative  men.  The  trouble  is  that  this 
spirit  is  too  esoteric,  too  private  and  personal. 
What  is  lacking  is  the  Institution  of  it,  the  organ- 
ized and  conscious  togetherness  of  those  who  have 
been  loosed  from  the  bonds  of  religious  and  po- 
litical superstition,  whose  minds  are  not  bullied 
either  by  scripture  or  social  tradition,  and  who 


THE  INSTITUTIONAL  PRINCIPLE 


retain  withal  a  lively  faith,  which  they  are  ready 
to  invest  in  civilizing  enterprises. 

If  we  are  ruled  by  the  money-power  —  /.  e.t 
by  a  mind-weakening  fear  of  hunger  and  commer- 
cial panic  —  it  is  not  because  the  foolish  are  in- 
trinsically stronger  than  the  faithful,  but  because 
weak-mindedness  is  organized  into  solid  pha- 
lanxes of  class,  sect,  and  party,  while  common 
sense  is  a  mere  good-natured  crowd. 

The  social  change  that  is  impending  cannot  be 
accomplished  by  individuals  acting  in  isolation  — 
even  though  the  sensible  people  were  two-thirds  of 
the  population.  Society  is  impossible  without  an 
overt  and  conscious  meeting  of  minds  —  the  es- 
tablishment of  a  seat  of  authority.  In  the  absence 
of  an  institution  to  nucleate  the  authority  of  art 
and  science,  it  is  impossible  to  escape  from  the  rule 
of  an  irrational  sovereignty.  Social  changes  are 
massive.  The  isolated  thinker  is  swept  away  by 
the  surge  of  the  great  social  tides.  We  exaggerate 
the  osmotic  power  of  fine  ideas.  The  view-point 
of  the  university  is  insignificant,  if  not  unintelli- 
gible, in  the  temples  of  priests  and  lawyers. 

In  the  absence  of  an  artistic-scientific  polarity 
of  social  organization,  the  sway  of  an  irrational 
and  uneconomical  state-sovereignty  has  always 
been  unavoidable.  There  has  followed,  alike  un- 
der many  kinds  of  political  constitutions,  a  social 

65 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


struggle  to  get  possession  of  the  high  seats  of 
power.  And  this  struggle  has  absorbed  the  best 
energies  of  men  to  the  comparative  neglect  of  the 
earth-wrestle,  since  it  has  been  made  more  impor- 
tant to  the  prosperity  of  the  individual  that  he 
should  get  on  the  right  side  of  the  law  than  that 
he  should  acquire  productive  efficiency. 

Thus  the  two  immemorial  classes  have  arisen, 
the  class  above  the  law  and  that  below  it.  But 
the  struggle  for  political  ascendency  kills  the  goose 
that  lays  the  golden  egg;  the  social  organism  as 
a  whole  loses  economic  efficiency  with  the  widening 
of  the  gap  between  the  successful  and  the  unsuc- 
cessful, and  the  consequent  exacerbation  of  the 
class-struggle.  Society  as  a  whole  grows  poorer 
day  by  day — if  not  in  bulk  of  commodities,  yet 
in  artistic  and  scientific  competence,  the  ability  to 
create  real  values  —  while  at  the  same  time  the 
dominant  class  increases  its  accumulation  of  le- 
gally enforceable  claims  against  the  commonwealth. 
In  this  manner  the  vital  social  energy  is  turned 
against  itself;  bankruptcy  supervenes,  with  moral 
prostration  and  a  decomposition  of  the  social 
tissues. 

Sovereign  states  fall,  but  alas !  only  to  rise  again 
and  repeat  the  heart-sickening  process.  And 
doubtless  the  process  will  be  repeated  again  and 
again —  as  many  times  as  may  be  necessary — until 

66 


THE  INSTITUTIONAL  PRINCIPLE 


the  artistic-scientific  spirit  shall  break  into  politics 
and  sweep  out  of  men's  minds  the  superstitions  of 
arbitrary  and  conventional  law. 

But  this  storming  of  the  strongholds  of  politi- 
cal superstition  cannot  be  accomplished  by  the 
literary  mob  —  or  by  raw  levies  of  educated  men. 

The  university  must  become  a  militant  order, 
a  self-conscious  and  self -confident  army. 

The  artistic-scientific  spirit  must  open  up  its  re- 
cruiting-stations. It  needs  a  post-office  address  in 
every  town. 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


VII 

THE  THREE  GREAT  VISIONS  OF  THE 
OLD  WORLD 

FOR  a  thousand  years  and  more  Christianity 
yeasted  the  world  with  the  hope  of  a  new 
order;  and  then  there  was  born  —  out  of  the  body 
of  the  Church  —  the  University.  The  university 
of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries  was,  as  has 
been  said,  a  political  fact,  a  municipality.  Thus 
for  a  moment,  some  centuries  ago,  the  spirit  of  art 
and  science  did  actually  get  into  politics.  It  ac- 
quired a  territorial  jurisdiction  and  began  to  cam- 
paign for  the  possession  of  the  earth.  The  univer- 
sities of  Oxford,  Paris,  Bologna,  Salerno,  were 
cities  —  civic  associations  for  the  nurture  of  art 
and  science.  The  University  stood  between  the 
Pope  and  the  Emperor  and  skillfully  played  the 
one  against  the  other,  fighting  for  its  own  footing 
and  the  kingdom  that  was  to  come. 

The  Old  World  had  three  great  visions  of  uni- 
versal order.  It  dreamed  first  of  a  Roman  Empire 
that  should  put  the  will  of  all  mankind  in  the 

68 


THREE   VISIONS   OF   THE  OLD  WORLD 

service  of  pure  intellect.  Its  law  should  be  the 
perfection  of  human  reason,  and  that  law  should 
execute  itself  from  east  to  west  and  north  to  south 
by  the  arms  of  irresistible  legions.  For  the  Army 
is  the  Empire.  It  is  not  brute  force  —  no  thinker 
has  ever  thought  of  ruling  the  world  by  brute 
force  —  but  the  force  of  ordered  and  passionless 
intelligence,  crushing  down  all  personal  affections 
and  the  rebellious  motions  of  the  heart.  This  was 
the  Old  World's  earliest  vision  of  universal  order. 
It  faded.  The  legions  broke  and  were  shattered 
against  the.  indomitable  instincts  of  humanity.  In 
its  grand  sweep  and  compass  men  do  not  behold 
even  in  dreams  this  vision  of  the  Empire  any 
more.  The  pulse  of  imperialism  is  fitful  and  fail- 
ing; and  now  at  length  the  name  is  given  to  a 
sentimental  provincialism  marching  behind  the 
trade-signs  of  market-men  and  promoters.  The 
dream  of  the  Empire  has  come  to  nothing.  The 
old  Roman  logic  has  been  cancelled  by  the  Master 
of  History  with  a  non-sequitur. 

But  when  the  dream  of  Caesar  first  began  to 
fade  there  arose  another  vision  of  universal  order, 
still  more  magnificent  —  the  dream  of  Augustine 
and  Ambrose,  of  Hildebrand  and  Innocent.  They 
dreamed  of  a  Holy  Catholic  Church  that  should 
arise  more  terrible  and  glorious  than  armies,  to 
beat  down  that  tyranny  of  Intellect  which  had 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


bruised  and  broken  the  hearts  of  men,  and  win 
the  whole  world  to  the  sway  of  suffering  but  im- 
perious Love. 

Shut  your  ecclesiastical  chronicles  and  under- 
stand this  thing  —  the  Church  of  the  dream  of 
Hildebrand,  the  most  magnificent  failure  in  the 
human  record  to  this  date.  For  the  inner  meaning 
of  it  all  is  as  plain  as  a  homely  household  tale. 
The  empire  had  laid  out  its  flinty  roads  and  de- 
ployed its  legions  by  the  book  of  geometry  and 
arithmetic;  it  had  mangled  the  heart  of  the  uni- 
verse under  the  wheels  of  its  inflexible  law  and 
logic.  The  Church  was  the  revolt  of  the  Soul  — 
exaggerated,  monstrous,  yet  majestic  in  its  bal- 
ancing of  the  accounts  of  history.  It  condemned 
and  executed  the  heartless  Intellect  for  the  age-long 
outrage  that  it  had  wrought  upon  human  nature. 

The  Church  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  no  man's 
invention  —  not  Peter's  nor  Pope  Gregory's.  It 
would  have  come  to  pass  in  its  essence,  sooner  or 
later,  if  Paul  had  never  preached  and  if  the  focal 
point  of  the  world-revolution  had  fallen  not  at 
Nazareth  or  Jerusalem,  but  somewhere  else.  The 
imperial  Church  was  not  of  Christ  —  nor  of  anti- 
Christ.  It  was  the  recoil  of  the  Empire.  The 
Church's  contempt  for  the  intellect  was,  to  be 
sure,  no  more  valid  than  the  Empire's  contempt 
for  the  heart.  And  yet  the  mediaeval  Church  was 

70 


THREE   VISIONS   OF   THE  OLD   WORLD 

as  inevitable  as  the  Western  continent  —  to  balance 
the  Eastern.  It  was  created  from  the  reaction  of 
human  nature  against  the  intolerable  tyranny  of 
cold  reason.  It  was  a  splendid  defiance  flung  in 
the  teeth  of  formal  logic,  by  the  repressed  emotion 
of  the  race. 

The  majestic  fabric  of  mediaeval  Catholicism 
fell  into  ruins  and  its  vision  of  universal  order 
vanished  away,  because  emotion  without  intellect 
is  as  impracticable  as  intellect  without  feeling  — 
and  has  no  more  permanent  a  validity.  The  eccle- 
siastical system  that  had  been  built  up  to  fight  the 
insolence  of  "  pure  reason  "  —  fire  with  fire  —  was 
good  for  that  purpose,  but  it  was  not  good  for 
anything  else.  The  builders  of  the  militant  Church 
did  not  know  how  to  set  the  conquered  Intellect 
soberly  to  work  upon  the  earth  in  the  service  of 
the  triumphant  Soul.  And  so  the  fighting  Church 
passed  by,  with  its  pageantry  of  spiritual  pride  — 
not,  however,  without  leaving  a  witness  in  the 
world.  For  long  before  the  vision  of  the  universal 
Church  had  passed,  a  new  vision  of  world-order 
had  thrilled  the  hearts  of  seeing  men.  It  is  a  light 
that  has  never  failed  since  first  it  rose  —  the  vision 
of  a  world-wide  republic  of  art  and  science,  the 
University. 

It  is  a  fact  to  be  pondered  that  the  Empire  could 
not  produce  a  genuine  university.  Under  the  sway 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


of  the  cold  and  abstract  intellect  there  were  gram- 
mar-schools and  pedagogues  a  plenty;  and  immense 
knowledge-stores,  such  as  the  Musuem  of  Alexan- 
dria, stocked  with  an  inexhaustible  variety  of  in- 
formation. But  the  spirit  of  the  university  —  the 
spirit  of  buoyant  and  intrepid  intellectual  adven- 
ture —  was  nowhere  to  be  found.  The  Empire 
could  not  have  tolerated  the  university,  because 
the  university  could  not  have  tolerated  the  Empire. 
The  university  is  by  its  constitution  anti-militarist 
and  democratic.  To  every  Czar  and  Csesar  it  is 
a  hot-bed  of  sedition;  for  it  acknowledges  no 
master  —  save  the  master  of  arts. 

To  suppose  that  the  university  stands  for  the 
rule  of  pedants  and  dons,  the  rule  of  professional 
intellectuals,  is  a  childish  blunder  —  like  supposing 
that  cities  are  governed  by  policemen.  Since  the 
university  contends  for  the  emancipation  of  the 
intellect,  it  challenges  all  monopolies,  especially 
that  of  the  men  who  would  sequestrate  the  key  of 
knowledge.  It  proclaims  the  right  of  the  spade 
and  the  bayonet  to  think  —  releasing  the  conscript 
and  the  clod-hopper  from  all  authorities  save  those 
that  are  grounded  in  common  sanity  and  the  de- 
mands of  civilization.  The  emancipation  of  the 
intellect  breaks  the  spell  of  intellectualism. 

In  the  beginnings  of  modern  science,  the  Church 
fought  hard  against  the  arrogance  of  "  pure  rea- 

72 


THREE    VISIONS    OF  THE   OLD   WORLD 

son,"  and  incidentally  and  through  misunderstand- 
ing made  life  hard  and  death  insistent  for  many 
true  men  of  science,  "  humble  men  of  heart " ; 
but  the  Church  was  never  the  deliberate  enemy  of 
the  " practical  reason"  the  reason  that  expresses 
itself  technologically  and  in  the  forms  of  art.  On 
the  contrary,  the  Church  of  the  Middle  Ages  fur- 
nished the  indispensable  milieu  for  the  gestation 
of  the  modern  spirit.  It  was  the  placenta  of 
modern  science.  For  modern  science  in  its  char- 
acteristic mood  is  practical  and  utilitarian  —  the 
intellect  is  not  permitted  to  lord  it  over  humanity, 
but  is  made  the  meek  handmaiden  of  civilizing 
industry.  And  this  was  also  the  characteristic 
mood  of  the  church  that  built  the  cathedrals, 
housed  the  craft-guilds  under  their  roofs,  and  cov- 
ered Europe  from  the  Mediterranean  to  the  Baltic 
with  free  cities  —  the  church  that  made  its  monks 
not  only  the  curators  of  classic  scholarship,  but 
the  conquerors  of  stubborn  soils  and  pestiferous 
swamps. 

There  is  no  more  significant  word  to  mark  the 
relationship  of  the  university  to  the  religious  tra- 
dition of  our  race  than  that  great  saying  of  An- 
selm:  "  I  believe,  in  order  that  I  may  understand." 
For  it  was  impossible  that  the  human  spirit  should 
ever  become  truly  and  practically  scientific,  that 
men  should  ever  set  their  hands  soberly  to  the 

73 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


earth-subduing  task  until  they  had  given  up  the 
attempt  to  think  out  a  way  to  right  living  and  had 
confidently  settled  down  upon  the  earth  to  live  and 
learn  —  believing  in  the  unity  and  reasonableness 
of  the  universe,  and  in  the  malleability  of  all  ma- 
terials under  uthe  hammers  of  the  world-smiths." 
Anselm's  aphorism  is  the  right  watch-word  of  the 
modern  university  and  it  contains  the  promise  and 
potency  of  a  sound  industrial  democracy.  The 
sceptical  and  speculative  intellect  has  always  de- 
spised the  laborer  and  clogged  the  wheels  of  in- 
dustry. It  is  by  keeping  this  fact  in  mind  that 
one  may  best  understand  how  it  came  to  pass  that 
the  faithless  and  heart-contemning  empire  with 
all  its  boast  of  intellectualism  weakened  and  de- 
pressed the  creative  mind,  how  the  historic  Church 
became  the  legitimate  progenitor  of  the  university, 
and  how  it  is  given  to  the  university  to  fulfill  the 
dream  of  universal  order  that  to  ecclesiastical  Ca- 
tholicism was  only  a  dream. 

The  church  becomes  the  university  of  the  peo- 
ple; that  is  the  conception  that  grips  the  antinomies 
of  Catholicism  and  Protestantism  and  preserves 
to  our  thought  the  unbroken  spiritual  tradition  of 
modern  history.  For  what  is  Protestantism,  with 
its  "  private  judgment  "  and  "  justification  by  faith 
only,"  but  an  attempt  to  make  faith  consist  with 
freedom  of  the  mind  —  an  attempt  to  turn  the 

74 


THREE   VISIONS   OF   THE  OLD   WORLD 

church  into  a  university  of  the  people?  Protes- 
tantism has  failed  simply  because  it  has  not  been 
thorough-going.  It  is  because  it  has  flinched 
from  the  conclusion  of  its  own  logic  that  it  has 
filled  the  world  with  jangling  and  impotent 
sects. 

Protestantism  has  been  humanly  interesting  and 
intelligible  only  when  it  has  been  frankly  political 
—  as  in  the  rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic  or  the 
planting  of  the  New  England  Colonies.  That 
is  to  say,  that  it  has  been  true  to  its  own  im- 
plications only  when  it  has  conceived  of  its  bond 
of  union  as  being,  not  dogmatic  or  sacramental, 
but  territorial,  the  bond  of  fellow-citizenship.  The 
only  Protestantism  that  history  can  care  much 
about  stepped  down  out  of  the  cathedral  stalls 
in  the  days  of  the  Reformation  to  lift  in  the 
market-place  the  standard  of  a  new  political  order. 
And  the  only  Protestantism  that  weighs  an  ounce 
in  the  scales  of  destiny  is  that  which  did  not  turn 
its  back  on  the  Catholic  ideals  of  spiritual  unity 
and  territorial  jurisdiction,  but  only  girded  itself 
with  new  confidence  to  carry  them  bravely  out. 
In  a  word,  it  is  too  late  to  attempt  to  organize  any 
kind  of  a  religious  society  aloof  and  apart  from 
the  secular  order;  the  time  has  come  to  make  a 
burnt  offering  of  all  forms  of  ecclesiasticism  and 
to  apply  the  disciplined  spirit  of  Christianity  to  the 

75 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


task  of  organizing  secular  society  itself —  on  a  re- 
ligious basis.  The  Artistic-Scientific  Republic  is 
the  true  Church. 

The  welter  of  moral  and  intellectual  confusion 
through  which  we  have  passed  in  the  last  four 
hundred  years  has  changed  the  meaning  of  many 
historic  words.  It  has  become  impossible  for  the 
spiritual  enterprise  of  our  day  to  express  itself  in 
the  one-time  eloquent  language  of  Christianity  and 
the  Church.  If  the  Protestant  Reformation  had 
not  on  the  whole  miscarried,  there  is  little  doubt 
that  "  Church  "  would  be  the  word  that  men  would 
use  to  name  the  institution  that  must  stand  in  every 
town  and  city  ward  as  the  primary  organization  of 
a  government  that  is  by  the  people  and  for  the 
people.  But  the  topsy-turvydom  of  sect  has  made 
it  impossible  to  use  that  word  —  because  it  has 
acquired  a  meaning  that  is  the  contradictory  oppo- 
site of  what  once  it  meant.  It  meant  once  the 
union  of  all  minds;  it  means  now  the  classification 
of  men  according  to  their  speculative  eccentricities. 
Since,  then,  it  is  impracticable  to  resume  the  origi- 
nal use  of  the  word,  why  not  let  it  go  ?  The  world 
is  not  to  be  saved  by  a  word.  The  Church  that 
spends  itself  in  a  mere  blind  protest  against  reason 
and  science  has  nothing  but  a  name  to  live;  and 
why  begrudge  it  that?  It  is  dead.  It  has  no 
mission  in  modern  society.  But  the  Church  that 


THREE   VISIONS   OF  THE  OLD   WORLD 

has  patiently  disciplined  the  intellect  to  the  uses  of 
humanity  and  art,  the  Church  that  is  the  nourish- 
ing mother  of  the  university  —  can  best  carry  its 
work  forward  to  perfect  victory  under  the  uni- 
versity name. 


77 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


VIII 

THE    RISE   OF   THE   NEW  CREATIVE 
ORDER 

NEVER  again  on  this  planet  will  it  be  possi- 
ble to  organize  society  on  a  grand  scale  for 
any  other  purpose  than  for  work.  For  unnum- 
bered ages  it  has  been  possible  to  draw  vast  popu- 
lations into  an  organization  for  praying  or  for 
fighting;  but  all  that  is  passing  or  has  passed. 
Small  populations  and  parts  of  large  ones  —  sects 
and  parties  —  can  still  be  got  to  submit  to  regimen- 
tation for  these  ends,  but  the  power  of  such  so- 
cieties is  failing  with  the  fainting  pulse  of  the  old 
regime.  A  man  with  the  modern  breath  in  him 
hates  the  thought  of  an  organization  for  the  main- 
tenance of  fine  theories  and  excellent  states  of 
mind.  For  these  he  will  not  pray  any  more  nor 
fight  any  more.  Social  organization  as  it  is  being 
*  worked  out  in  the  United  States  is  simply  industrial 
organization.  There  is  a  religious  motive,  and  a 
political  method  —  but  the  soul  of  the  organiza- 
tion is  industrialism.  This  is  the  age  of  Business. 
Religion  is  the  whip  and  spur  and  Politics  is  the 
bit  and  bridle,  but  Business  is  the  horse  and  the 

78 


RISE   OF   THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

rider.  Never  again  on  this  continent  will  the  poli- 
tician impose  his  elocutions  and  his  diplomacies 
upon  the  man  of  business.  It  has  become  —  since 
the  events  of  the  other  day  —  quite  as  impossible 
that  the  industrial  order  should  be  ruled  by  pro- 
fessional statesmen  as  that  it  should  be  ruled  by 
professional  churchmen. 

If  the  industrial  system  works  at  cross-purposes 
and  grinds  its  own  cogs  —  gives  some  more  than 
they  can  spend  and  others  less  than  they  can  live 
by  —  it  is  because  the  people  hold  back,  afraid  to 
commit  themselves  frankly  to  the  new  order  of  the 
world.  They  keep  on  paying  the  tax  of  Old  World 
privilege  because  they  fight  against  it  with  Old 
World  weapons  —  the  blunderbusses  of  profes- 
sional politics  and  professional  religion.  Not  half 
of  us  understand  that  a  revolution  has  taken  place 
—  that  we  have  just  passed  the  poignant  crisis  of 
the  revolution  that  began  with  the  discovery  of 
America  and  the  earth-hunger  of  the  Elizabethan 
age  —  and  that  society  in  this  country  rests  now 
not  upon  political  and  religious  formulas,  but  upon 
industrial  and  commercial  ideas.  Social  organiza- 
tion, according  to  those  that  understand  what  has 
happened,  consists  now  simply  in  getting  men  into 
their  right  places  according  to  their  competency 
and  the  requirements  of  the  day's  work.  The  con- 
ditions of  the  material  problem  determine  the 

79 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


form  of  the  social  organization.  The  exploitation 
of  the  universe  is  the  game,  and  Nature  yields  not 
to  wishes,  but  to  work.  The  organization  is  for 
work,  and  the  law  and  order  of  it  is  not  to  be 
deduced  from  tradition,  not  to  be  thought  out  in 
libraries  nor  fought  out  in  struggles  for  abstract 
justice.  It  is  a  problem  in  fine  art  and  engineering 
and  is  to  be  settled  by  the  resources  of  human 
nature  in  face  of  the  nature  of  things. 

The  old  world  of  memory  and  dull  prejudice, 
now  passing  to  its  rest,  has  exhausted  its  passion 
in  the  vain  attempt  to  establish  upon  the  earth 
the  throne  of  justice  and  truth  —  leaving  the 
world's  work  undone;  a  new  order  arises  and 
girds  itself  for  the  work  of  civilization,  without 
heart-ache  or  head-ache,  confident  that  the  inner 
truth  and  right  of  things  may  be  safely  left  to  its 
own  self-vindicating  power.  It  was  David  Strauss, 
the  author  of  Leben  Jesu,  who  first  made  the  re- 
mark that  morality  consists  in  the  relating  of  man 
to  man,  while  religion  consists  in  the  relating  of 
man  to  the  universe.  Accordingly,  it  may  be  said 
that  in  Europe  social  order  is  still  a  conventional 
arrangement  and  rests  upon  some  well-settled 
moral  theory;  religion  is  merely  called  in  to  prop 
up  the  existing  code  of  law  —  the  State  supports 
the  Church  as  an  aid  to  the  police.  But  America, 
just  because  it  makes  no  account  of  religious  forms, 

80 


RISE  OF   THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

has  a  way  with  it  that  is  essentially  religious. 
More  and  more  society  in  this  country  is  going  to 
depend  for  its  unity,  not  upon  the  fixity  of  moral 
codes,  but  upon  the  sound  relation  of  a  lot  of 
private  persons  to  the  constitution  of  the  universe 
—  the  God  of  the  open  air.  Morality  —  the  man- 
ner of  human  relationships  —  in  this  new  world  is 
not  the  underpinning  of  social  order,  but  the  con- 
summate flower  of  labor  and  love  —  the  finest  of 
the  fine  arts. 

The  old  story  goes  that  Phidias,  who  carved 
the  frieze  of  the  Parthenon,  was  regarded  with 
some  disdain  by  his  contemporaries  because,  after 
all,  he  occupied  himself  as  a  stone-cutter  when  he 
might  have  been  babbling  philosophy  and  politics. 
The  ancient  man's  disrespect  for  industry  was  due 
to  his  cosmic  cowardice,  his  dread  of  tackling 
Nature  with  naked  hands.  The  plain  truth  is  that 
the  Old  World  built  its  little  states  on  moral 
platitudes  and  dyked  them  around  to  keep  out  the 
creative  instincts  and  the  elemental  currents.  Of 
course  the  tides  of  Nature,  soon  or  late,  flooded 
the  narrow  streets  of  the  old  cities  and  upheaved 
the  foundations  of  fixed  and  formal  law.  The 
Babel-towers  tumbled  down  because  they  were  built 
on  one  settled  theory  or  another  of  what  the  truth 
is,  without  regard  to  the  changeful,  flowing  reality 
of  the  truth  as  it  is  actually  dealt  with  by  working- 

81 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


men.  The  Old  World  is  an  in-door  world;  it  is 
the  mission  of  America  to  break  the  spell  of  its 
fatality  by  moving  out  into  the  sun  and  wind. 

The  Republic  is  not  an  organization  for  the 
protection  of  rights  and  the  punishment  of  wrongs, 
any  more  than  it  is  a  missionary  society  for  the 
propagation  of  the  accredited  creeds;  it  is  a 
partnership  of  the  people  for  the  prosecution  of 
the  arts  and  sciences  —  an  industrial  combination 
for  the  building  of  cosmopolitan  cities  and  the 
conduct  of  a  world-commerce.  Its  laws  are  drawn 
not  to  reward  good  people  and  punish  bad  ones, 
but  to  defeat  the  folly  of  bunglers  and  release  the 
energies  of  the  efficient. 

The  social  problem  —  the  antagonism  of  classes 
—  will  exist  here  as  elsewhere  and  will  grow  more 
and  more  acute  so  long  as  we  persist  in  regarding 
the  Republic  as  a  State  built  on  the  Old  World 
plan  for  dealing  out  abstract  justice  to  rival  claim- 
ants. The  problem  will  be  solved  and  the  class 
antagonism  will  wear  down  when  we  accept  the 
whole  programme  implied  in  the  American  Revo- 
lution and  begin  to  see  this  unprecedented  social 
order  of  ours  in  its  true  light  as  a  business  part- 
nership for  the  pursuit  of  human  happiness.  This 
is  the  uniqueness  of  the  democratic  republic  —  the 
world-changing  significance  of  our  new-born  West- 
ern society. 

82 


RISE   OF   THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

The  class  struggle,  with  all  its  loss  and  misery, 
is  an  inevitable  fact  so  long  as  the  political  and 
religious  organization  of  society  is  conceived  of  as 
a  thing  apart  and  aloof  from  the  organization  of 
industry.  The  real  outcome  of  the  historic  struggle 
of  the  workers  for  a  fair  chance  has  been  the 
gradual  dissolution  of  purely  political  and  purely 
religious  society  and  the  growing  absorption  of  the 
political  and  religious  interest  of  men  in  the  de- 
velopment of  the  industrial  order.  Man,  as  the 
mere  creature  of  God,  the  quintessence  of  dust,  and 
the  subject  of  laws,  gives  way  to  man  as  the  im- 
prover of  the  creation  —  the  master  of  materials 
and  the  maker  of  laws. 

The  industrial  order  is  the  kingdom  of  creative 
humanity,  and  it  is  going  to  solve  the  social  prob- 
lem by  making  laws  for  economizing  the  repressed 
creative  forces  of  the  people  without  much  regard 
to  theoretical  or  customary  rights:  democracy, 
liberty,  equality,  fraternity,  are  only  fine  names  so 
long  as  a  man's  legal  rights  determine  what  he  can 
do;  they  become  the  life  of  the  law  as  soon  as 
what  a  man  can  do  determines  his  legal  rights. 

The  gap  between  capitalism  and  laborism  can 
never  be  closed  by  purely  political  devices.  There 
is  no  way  of  organizing  political  society  apart  from 
industrial  society  that  will  not  at  last  produce  a 
ruling  class  and  a  ruled  class  —  masters  and  slaves 

83 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


—  a  stationary  order  and  the  death  of  enterprise. 
One  set  of  people  will  be  legally  empowered  to 
do  what  they  are  naturally  incompetent  to  do,  and 
another  set  will  be  legally  disqualified  for  doing 
their  natural  work.  If  the  millionaire  senators, 
metropolitan  bishops,  money-magnates,  labor- 
marshals,  sociological  experts,  prophets  of  Para- 
dise, and  so  on  —  were  to  agree  together  upon  a 
definition  of  righteousness  and  frame  it  into  a 
perfect  political  system,  the  world  of  enterprise 
would  hate  their  righteousness  and  repudiate  their 
system  within  a  week.  In  an  industrial  society  the 
right  of  things  must  work  in  a  sliding  scale,  ac- 
cording to  the  exigencies  of  the  business  in  hand. 
It  never  can  be  fixed  and  settled  by  moralists. 

It  is  in  the  course  of  our  adventures  into  more 
intimate  relations  with  the  Soul  of  the  Cosmos 
that  we  are  to  open  up  the  sealed  orders  of  demo- 
cratic justice.  There  is  no  dissolving  of  any  of  our 
economic  doubts  so  long  as  the  question  of  prop- 
erty is  posed  in  the  old  unworldly  way —  as  if  the 
question  were :  Which  of  the  litigants  has  the  di- 
viner right  to  quit  work  and  retire  into  a  heaven  of 
rumination  and  rest?  We  shall  solve  the  social 
question  fast  enough  when  we  begin  to  ask  the 
right  question.  The  question  of  property  must 
be  stated  as  a  problem  of  industrial  expediency: 
Which  of  all  the  proposed  measures  will  best  avail 

84 


RISE  OF   THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

to  put  tools  into  the  hands  that  can  use  them,  and 
release  to  the  maximum  the  creative  faculties  of 
men?  That  is  the  right  question,  and  there  is 
always  a  workable  solution.  But  the  solution  is 
never  final.  There  is  no  finished  formula  for  the 
working  of  a  farm. 

This  idea  of  organizing  society  on  one  plane  for 
the  maintenance  of  rights,  and  then  organizing  it 
again  on  another  and  lower  plane  for  the  doing  of 
work,  is  an  idea  that  can  hold  its  own  only  where 
industry  is  unsystematic  and  labor  is  despised,  only 
where  the  conception  of  the  spiritual  conquest  of 
the  material  world  has  not  yet  risen  to  be  —  as  it  is 
coming  to  be  in  America — the  romance  and  pas- 
sion of  the  people.  Democracy  as  a  mere  political 
programme  has  had  results  that  are  mainly  nega- 
tive. Moving  in  the  sphere  of  politics,  as  distinct 
from  that  of  industry,  democracy  has  not  solved 
the  social  problem,  and  cannot.  It  cannot  release 
the  creative  faculties  of  the  people  from  the  an- 
cient thralldom  of  authoritarian  law.  Yet  it  has 
done  the  world  a  service:  it  has  discredited  the 
political  superstition  —  has  proved  that  a  progress- 
ive society  can  not  be  ordered  on  the  metaphysical 
ground  of  abstract  right.  Just  so  Protestantism, 
with  all  its  vagaries,  has  destroyed  the  ecclesiastical 
superstition  —  proved  the  inapplicability  of  any 
miraculous  revelation  as  a  pattern  for  social  order. 

85 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


Political  democracy,  like  Protestantism,  is  seen  to 
be  an  impossible  and  transitional  phase  of  exis- 
tence, a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium.  It  calls  in 
question  the  sovereignty  of  princes  and  presidents, 
but  it  is  incapable  of  establishing  the  sovereignty 
of  the  people  —  except  in  a  documentary  sense. 
Democracy  comes  to  itself  only  when  it  gives  up 
the  attempt  to  create  a  political  organization  apart 
from  the  industrial  order  —  just  as  Protestantism 
realizes  its  own  implications  of  moral  and  intel- 
lectual liberty  only  when  it  stops  trying  to  organize 
a  church  apart  from  the  secular  world.  The  parties 
and  sects  that  have  come  out  of  political  democracy 
and  Protestantism  are  the  lees  and  dregs  of  the  old 
regime:  its  wine  is  in  the  veins  of  the  working 
world. 

When  the  population  of  the  United  States  was 
small  and  our  industrial  order  an  orbless  nebula, 
it  seemed  possible  to  keep  the  political  order  sepa- 
rated from  industry,  but  parallel  in  its  develop- 
ment. It  was  supposed  for  a  moment  that  the 
New  World  had  invented  political  machinery  that 
could  work  changes  in  the  law  as  fast  as  the  indus- 
trial machinery  could  work  changes  in  the  condi- 
tions of  existence.  But  it  has  been  demonstrated 
in  the  last  quarter-century  that  Metaphysical  Poli- 
tics and  Intensive  Industry  are  nags  that  can  not 
be  coaxed  to  travel  in  double  harness.  If  one 

86 


RISE   OF   THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

grows  blithe  and  mettlesome,  the  other  goes  lame. 
There  remains  no  question  now  as  to  which,  on  the 
whole,  is  the  sounder  animal  and  longer  for  this 
world. 

The  scholars  in  politics  have  had  their  day  and 
ceased.  The  paralysis  of  ideal  politics  has  be- 
come the  settled  and  successful  policy  of  business. 
The  industrials  contrive  somehow  that  nothing 
political  shall  be  done.  And  the  most  that  a  poli- 
tician can  do  in  these  days  is  to  hold  up  their  wheels 
on  the  road  for  a  moment  —  by  the  threat  of  doing 
something.  It  is  not  the  total  depravity  of  trust- 
makers  that  has  sapped  the  vigor  of  the  political 
system  —  that  is  a  pious  prejudice.  The  truth  is 
that  the  political  system  had  no  vigor.  The  virtue 
of  the  age  had  gone  out  of  it. 

For  two  full  generations  the  tenser  life  of  the 
American  people  has  been  given  to  industry — in 
contempt  of  politics.  It  is  the  instinct  of  efficiency 
to  despise  the  mock  heroics  and  cumbersome  in- 
direction of  political  reform.  Nobody  with  a  talent 
for  accomplishing  things  can  spend  his  time  in  per- 
suading a  multitude  of  people  to  think  alike.  There 
is  a  shorter  way  of  changing  the  laws  than  by  talk. 
It  is  discovered  that  every  stroke  of  effectual  in- 
dustry changes  the  nature  of  man  and  the  condi- 
tions of  earthly  existence  —  and  that  changes  the 
laws.  If  our  super-mundane  political  system  now 

8? 


THE    UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


makes  for  the  interest  of  plutocracy  —  the  infernal 
reign  of  Plutus  — that  is  because  it  is  a  dead  body. 
And  a  dead  politics  in  the  house  is  as  dangerous  to 
health  as  a  dead  religion. 

The  genius  of  this  land  is  industry  —  the  regen- 
erative life  of  the  world.  With  the  discrediting 
of  sects  and  parties  it  became  possible  for  the 
people  to  get  together  in  the  spirit  of  the  arts  and 
sciences,  for  the  work  of  civilization.  It  becomes 
possible  to  set  up  the  true  standard  of  the  univer- 
sity and  to  build  the  free  city. 

Of  course  the  spirit  of  the  arts  and  sciences  is 
the  same  thing  as  the  spirit  of  industry.  For  the 
spirit  of  industry  is  more  than  the  bulk  of  com- 
modities; it  is  the  victorious  heart  of  humanity  in 
wrestle  with  the  resistent  conditions  of  life.  A 
child  may  have  a  part  in  it.  A  serene  old  woman 
on  her  dying-bed  may  do  more  for  the  building 
of  the  free  city  than  fifty  navies  with  swinging 
mattocks. 

The  university  is  the  church  of  the  industrial 
republic  —  the  spiritual  organization  of  the  people 
for  adventurous  enterprise.  Its  standard  is  the 
original  and  final  creed  of  humanity  —  the  faith 
that  the  human  spirit  is  at  home  here;  that  the 
things  of  science  are  framed  for  the  works  of  art; 
that  the  hardest  materials  of  nature  are  plastic 
under  the  hand  of  an  indomitable  ideal. 

88 


RISE  OF  THE   NEW   CREATIVE   ORDER 

When  Abelard  left  the  cloister  and  went  out 
alone  into  the  Champagne  country,  followed  in 
his  exile  by  ten  thousand  men,  who  built  their 
huts  around  his  shack  in  the  wilderness,  to  share  the 
life  of  one  who  could  face  Nature  with  a  naked 
mind,  a  thing  had  happened  that  had  more  to  do 
with  the  rise  of  the  industrial  republic  of  the  West 
than  Magna  Charta  or  Martin  Luther. 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


IX 

THE    RISE   OF   FREE    CITIES   UNDER 
THE  NEW   ORDER 

A  FREE  city  is  a  city  that  rules  a  sufficient  area 
of  land  to  support  its  population  —  under  a 
law  framed  with  a  single  eye  to  the  advancement 
of  science  and  the  humanities. 

Such  a  city  as  this  has  been  the  goal  of  the  as- 
pirations of  wise  men  through  all  the  ages  of  civil- 
ization. But  the  thing  has  never  yet  been  realized 
in  any  settled  way.  The  most  thrilling  and  com- 
manding passages  of  history  are  those  in  which 
the  free  city  has  come  near  being  realized  for  a 
moment.  All  seeing  men  have  understood  that 
such  an  achievement  is  perfectly  possible,  have 
seen  indeed  that  it  is  quite  impossible  to  build  a 
city  that  shall  be  permanent,  on  any  other  basis. 
But  the  mass  of  us  have  always  up  to  this  time 
preferred  to  be  slaves  —  and  tyrants.  We  have 
never  respected  ourselves  enough  to  be  free.  And 
we  have  never  been  in  spirit  artistic  and  scientific 
enough  to  build  a  free  city  —  a  city  of  the  open 
air  so  masterfully  true  to  nature  that  its  palaces 
should  never  be  given  to  the  bats  and  owls. 

90 


RISE   OF  FREE   CITIES    UNDER   NEW   ORDER 

In  the  ancient  world  this  great  drama  of  disap- 
pointment was  played  out  principally  on  three 
stages:  at  Jerusalem,  at  Athens,  and  at  Rome. 
The  blood  leaps  even  now  at  all  these  names  — 
because  each  of  these  cities  in  turn  came  so  near 
being  free.  But  the  waves  of  time  swept  over 
them  all  and  they  all  became  memories  and  the 
haunts  of  tourists,  because  they  were  not  content 
to  rest  upon  the  principles  of  nature,  but  tried  to 
lord  it  over  other  towns.  One  might  say  that 
Jerusalem  failed  because  of  its  spiritual  tyranny, 
Athens  because  of  its  sentimental  top-loftiness,  and 
Rome  because  of  its  sheer  intellectual  insolence. 
Anyhow,  they  all  went  wrong  because  they  tried 
to  rule  the  world  and  to  set  it  in  order  on  principles 
that  were  other  than  artistic  and  scientific.  The 
Jerusalem  which  is  "  free  and  the  mother  of  us 
all"  has  not  yet  been  built  in  Palestine.  The 
"  shining,  violet-crowned  city  of  song  "  of  which 
Pindar  sang  —  that  "  August  Athenae  "  of  Pericles 
—  now  hires  a  king  from  western  Europe.  And 
the  City  of  the  Seven  Hills  is  a  cemetery  of  lost 
causes  that  deservedtfo  be  lost. 

But  the  idea  of  the  free  city  is  more  sure  of 
itself  than  ever.  There  is  a  great  momentum 
gathering  behind  it  through  all  the  disasters  of  the 
past. 

For  a  moment  in  recent  history  men  have  con- 

91 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


earned  themselves  much  with  vast  political  con- 
trivances —  but  we  shall  never  escape  for  long 
from  the  love  of  the  city.  The  statesmen  and 
lawyers  have  had  their  little  day,  have  held  the 
centre  of  the  stage  for  a  while  unfolding  to  us 
their  intricate  devices  —  their  day-dreams  of  sov- 
ereign states  and  empires.  But  states  and  em- 
pires are  pure  abstractions  unless  the  city  is  behind 
them.  They  are  not  real  and  tangible,  they  have 
only  a  documentary  existence.  The  city  is  the 
real  thing.  Nobody  ever  saw  with  the  naked  eye 
a  state  or  an  empire;  and  if  all  such  things  were 
abolished  in  a  night,  one  might  not  miss  them  in 
his  daily  walk.  But  the  city  is  a  part  of  the  ground- 
plan  of  nature,  as  much  as  a  bee-hive  or  a  beavers' 
dam.  It  exists  to  "  fulfill  the  desire  of  the  mute 
earth."  It  is  the  consummate  work  of  art;  and 
"art"  —  it  was  Aristotle  who  said  it  first — "is 
the  very  nature  of  man." 

Dr.  Edward  Everett  Hale  said  that  within  a 
generation  or  so  population  is  going  to  be  vastly 
diffused  and  everybody  is  going  to  live  in  a  green 
field  and  have  a  garden-patch.  All  this  may  indeed 
come  to  pass  through  improvements  in  the  means 
of  rapid  locomotion.  For  a  city  can  be  a  city  with- 
out being  crowded  —  and  in  fact  can  never  be  free 
or  fine  so  long  as  it  is  crowded. 

To-day  you  can  ride  nearly  an  hour  on  an  ex- 
92 


RISE    OF   FREE    CITIES    UNDER    NEW   ORDER 

press  train  from  the  outer  limits  of  Chicago  to 
Polk  Street  Station;  and  in  the  near  future  it  is 
likely  that  all  American  cities  will  be  as  big  as 
counties.  The  time-worn  antithesis  of  city  and 
country  will  soon  cease  to  have  a  meaning.  The 
city  will  have  forests  and  farms  in  it,  and  rus  in 
urbe  will  be  the  general  rule.  "  Uncle  Reuben  " 
will  pass  away  and  become  a  tradition  on  the 
same  day  with  the  "  Yellow  Kid."  There  will 
be  no  back-country  and  no  seething  slum.  Earth- 
commanding  municipalities  will  cover  the  whole 
land. 

The  essential  thing  about  a  city  is  not  density 
of  population,  but  a  social  unity  embodying  and 
expressing  itself  in  the  forms  of  art.  Nothing 
but  the  destruction  of  civilization  and  a  reversion 
to  barbarism  can  stop  the  tendency  of  society  to 
nucleate  in  cities.  And  the  dream  of  a  social 
State  of  undifferentiated  protoplasm  —  the  people 
spread  out  thin  and  even  across  a  continent  —  is 
not  likely  to  be  realized. 

A  myriad  of  human  habitations  grouped  around 
a  forum  or  market-place  and  surrounded  by  a 
considerable  area  of  open  country  —  this  is  the 
germ-cell  and  unit  of  civilization,  the  permanent 
physical  phenomenon  of  the  city.  It  is  older  than 
the  earliest  records  and  no  social  revolution  or 
convulsion  of  nature  is  likely  to  do  away  with  it. 

93 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


On  the  contrary,  all  the  deeper  currents  of  modern 
times  tend  to  give  it  peculiar  emphasis. 

There  is  indeed  a  superficial  tendency  running 
the  other  way  —  the  "ripper  bill"  tendency, 
which  derives  its  strength  from  the  theory  still 
rife  among  us  that  people  who  live  on  farms  or  in 
little  villages  are  purer  and  better  than  those  who 
live  in  large  towns.  The  men  who  run  the  state 
machines  and  boss  the  legislatures  know  all  too 
well  how  to  make  capital  out  of  these  old  supersti- 
tions, and  the  civic  abominations  as  they  actually 
exist  are  largely  due  to  the  fact  that  the  great 
cities  are  governed  by  farmers  and  country  law- 
yers assembled  at  Albany,  Harrisburg,  Colum- 
bus and  elsewhere,  to  manage  things  too  high  for 
their  understanding. 

The  truth  is,  that  city  life  is,  in  the  nature  of 
things,  a  higher  kind  of  life  than  country  life, 
and  to  live  it  well  requires  that  one  should  be 
more  human.  The  problems  of  the  city  cannot 
be  solved  in  the  back  country  or  u  up  the  state  " 
any  more  than  the  problems  of  a  grown  man  can 
be  solved  by  a  boy  —  or  the  problems  of  a  fish 
by  an  oyster. 

The  word  "pagan"  means,  as  every  Latin- 
school  boy  knows,  a  dweller  in  a  little  village. 
The  spiritual  quickening  which  went  through  the 
world  in  the  early  ages  of  this  era  was  felt  most 

94 


RISE   OF   FREE    CITIES    UNDER   NEW   ORDER 

in  great  cities ;  and  to  be  a  villager  came  to  mean 
the  same  thing  as  to  be  a  narrow-minded,  super- 
stitious person  clinging  to  the  knees  of  the  old 
idols. 

The  notion  that  cities  need  to  have  a  great  im- 
perial power  set  over  them  to  make  and  keep  them 
good  is  a  purely  pagan  notion.  It  is  supposed  by 
the  pagans  that  still  live  on  belated  in  these  times 
that  the  only  way  to  maintain  order  throughout  the 
land  is  to  get  all  the  respectable  people  to  profess 
unquestioning  obedience  to  a  mystic  oracle  or 
Mumbo-Jumbo  called  the  Sovereignty  of  the 
Nation.  There  is  no  use  arguing  with  people  who 
think  like  that.  Nothing  but  events  can  deal  with 
them. 

It  is  the  rise  of  the  vast  and  sensitive  system 
of  modern  industry  that  is  convincing  the  pagan 
that  his  god  is  a  wood  pulp  god  and  hears  not; 
that  the  god  of  law  and  order  is  not  to  be  wor- 
shipped in  documents  or  legal  theories. 

Industrialism  is  bound  to  free  the  cities  from 
the  over-lordship  of  state  legislatures  and  the 
national  military  power,  because  the  development 
of  industrialism  is  making  it  plain  that  social  order 
—  a  vigorous  and  progressive  social  unity  —  can 
be  maintained  on  the  grandest  scale,  throughout 
a  continent  and  the  whole  world,  without  resort 
to  the  ghost  realm  of  arbitrary  authority.  It  is 

95 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


being  discovered  in  this  tremendous  earth-wrestle 
of  modern  business  that  there  is  enough  morality 
in  the  very  nature  of  things  to  hold  the  American 
people  together  —  without  the  help  of  high  priests 
or  the  hired  devotions  of  the  regular  Army. 

The  point  is  that  when  ninety  million  people  set 
out  to  do  work  together  —  improve  the  universe, 
dam  its  floods,  dampen  its  droughts,  cut  its  isth- 
muses, and  so  on  —  when  a  vast  population, 
spread  over  a  continent,  comes  to  care  more  for 
business  than  for  anything  else,  then  a  new 
and  unprecedented  thing  happens.  It  is  discov- 
ered that  a  modern  city,  in  becoming  a  part  of  a 
great  industrial  system,  is  so  completely  bound  by 
the  very  nature  of  things  to  keep  the  peace  and 
act  decently  toward  all  her  neighbors,  that  there 
is  really  no  need  of  a  good  emperor  or  a  good 
president  to  wield  the  impartial  sword  of  sover- 
eign law  and  drive  bad  cities  into  line. 

When,  for  example,  Mr.  Grover  Cleveland 
sent  the  United  States  troops  to  Chicago  to  quell 
a  riot  which  was  supposed  to  be  impeding  the 
mails,  he  meant  entirely  well,  no  doubt.  But  he 
acted  like  a  man  out  of  a  book  or  one  from  the 
country.  He  seemed  not  to  be  aware  that  the  in- 
dustrial age  had  dawned;  that  in  this  new  day 
every  city  is  bound  to  every  other  and  to  the  whole 
industrial  order  in  such  sensitive  bonds  of  com- 


RISE   OF   FREE    CITIES    UNDER    NEW   ORDER 

merce  and  credit  that  it  cannot  live  without  wide 
social  peace  and  correspondence  with  the  rest  of 
the  world. 

In  the  age  of  the  Caesars  a  legion  was  indeed 
the  logical  medicine  for  a  disorder  in  a  city  of 
Gaul;  but  in  the  age  of  Cleveland  it  would  have 
sufficed  to  send  the  mails  for  a  day  or  two  around 
by  Peoria  and  Milwaukee  without  stopping  at 
Chicago.  Granted  that  there  really  was  a  dan- 
gerous mob  in  Chicago  on  that  occasion,  Chicago 
would  have  risen  up  and  subdued  it  in  an  after- 
noon, if  only  Chicago  had  been  well  assured,  as  it 
should  have  been,  that  it  must  depend  completely 
upon  itself;  and  that  the  rest  of  the  country  would 
continue  to  deal  with  it  only  so  long  as  it  played 
the  regular  game. 

At  the  end  of  a  day  of  successful  mob  rule  under 
such  conditions,  every  dollar  of  permanent  invest- 
ment in  Chicago  would  have  been  worth  not  more 
than  seventy-five  cents ;  and  at  the  end  of  a  week 
of  anarchy  the  youth  of  the  world  would  have 
flocked  to  Chicago  to  make  its  fortune  by  buying 
good  real  estate  for  a  song  and  putting  value  into 
it  by  vigilance  committee. 

Really,  it  is  too  late  for  Caesar  and  the  old  vil- 
lage ways;  this  is  the  day  of  industrial  law  —  the 
day  of  the  revelation  of  the  irresistible  morality 
that  exists  in  the  nature  of  things. 

97 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


X 

NATIONAL   UNIVERSITY  TOWNS 

LET  us  give  a  page  or  two  to  recapitulation  in 
order  to  remind  ourselves  of  the  steps  of  the 
argument  that  discloses  the  university  as  the  soul 
of  the  free  city  —  before  we  pass  to  consider  a 
practical  plan  for  the  creation  of  national  uni- 
versity towns. 

For  thousands  of  years  before  the  beginnings 
of  Christianity  nothing  considerable  had  been 
done  to  raise  the  general  standard  of  living  or 
make  the  average  man  more  at  home  in  the  world, 
and  for  more  than  a  thousand  years  afterward  the 
results  in  this  line  were  so  meagre  as  to  be  nearly 
negligible. 

The  disease  from  which  the  world  suffered  may, 
as  has  been  said,  be  described  as  a  morbid  breach 
between  the  intellect  and  the  emotions.  The  an- 
cients had  just  as  good  heads  as  modern  men  — 
and  just  as  good  hearts.  There  is  no  reason  to 
suppose  that  the  brains  of  our  great  men  are  any 
heavier  than  those  of  the  Pharaohs,  or  their  sen- 
timents any  finer.  The  trouble  with  the  Old  World 


NATIONAL   UNIVERSITY  TOWNS 


was  simply  that  its  intellect  and  its  emotions  had 
been  divorced  from  each  other.  Its  knowing- 
power  was  not  on  speaking  terms  with  its  motive- 
power. 

Emotion  is  the  driving- force  of  life  and  intellect  is 
the  steering  apparatus.  Emotion  does  all  the  work 
that  is  done  in  this  world,  but  without  intellect  it 
is  a  tread-mill  round  —  there  is  no  progress  in  it. 
On  the  other  hand,  thinking  that  is  not  touched 
with  emotion,  that  is  devoid  of  the  passion  of 
ideals,  is  mere  logic-chopping  or  empty  specula- 
tion. It  has  no  power  to  move  any  man's  hands. 
Because  of  this  "original  sin,"  therefore,  this 
hereditary  schism  between  the  intellect  and  the 
emotions,  the  human  race  lost  the  power  to  do 
intelligent  work  and  social  order  fell  into  an 
endless  class-struggle. 

It  was  the  most  striking  consequence  of  this 
disaster  that  for  five  thousand  years  nobody  ever 
clearly  thought  of  such  a  thing  as  a  social  organi- 
zation for  the  advancement  of  the  arts  and  sciences. 
It  was  the  Church  that  paved  the  difficult  way  to 
that  idea  by  insistence  that  the  God  within  a  man 
and  the  God  of  the  universe  are  one  and  the  same 
God.  This  was  as  much  as  to  say  that  the  law 
of  the  heart  can  come  to  terms  with  the  law  of  the 
head,  and  that  the  arts  and  the  sciences  are  two 
sides  of  the  same  thing  —  and  must  stick  together. 

99 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


So  it  came  to  pass  in  due  time  that  the  university 
was  born  out  of  the  cathedral  schools.  But  the 
university  was  much  more  than  a  school.  A  uni- 
versity was  a  free  city,  jealously  guarding  its  rights 
against  all  adverse  claims  of  the  Pope  and  the 
Emperor  and  striving  to  win  a  foothold  upon  the 
solid  ground  for  a  new  kind  of  social  order.  The 
world  had  had  more  than  enough  of  the  rule  of 
kings  and  more  than  enough  of  the  rule  of  crowds ; 
the  time  had  come  to  make  a  beginning  of  a  new 
kind  of  government  —  a  government  by  the  Mas- 
ters of  Materials  —  in  academic  phrase,  Masters 
of  Arts.  That  is  certainly  the  kind  of  government 
that  the  future  has  in  store  for  us.  It  will  give  a 
final  quietus  to  our  political  bewilderment,  for 
when  it  shall  be  fairly  established  it  can  never  be 
overthrown.  The  force  by  which  governments 
subsist  is  derived  from  the  elemental  forces  of 
nature.  All  the  forms  of  government  of  which 
we  have  had  experience  are  unstable  because  in 
them  the  force  which  the  law  undertakes  to  conse- 
crate does  not  coincide  with  the  force  that  men 
derive  from  nature.  But  when  government  gets 
into  the  hands  of  those  who  have  acquired  mas- 
tery of  the  natural  forces  and  know  how  to  use 
them  in  the  service  of  all,  such  a  government  will 
be  permanent  and  endlessly  progressive.  It  will 
be  irresistible,  both  because  it  will  have  in  its  own 

100 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


hands  the  energies  that  now  furnish  the  driving 
power  of  revolutions,  and  because  it  will  command 
the  moral  assent  of  the  people  by  constantly  serv- 
ing them.  It  will  fulfill  the  definition  both  of  a 
real  democracy  and  a  genuine  aristocracy. 

Of  course  the  universities  of  the  Middle  Ages 
did  not  realize  to  the  full  the  civic  conceptions 
that  were  implied  in  their  charters.  They  left  that 
for  us  to  do.  They  were  clogged  with  all  the 
morbid  traditions  of  the  past.  They  made  a  tre- 
mendous effort  to  bring  the  scientific  spirit  into 
effectual  correspondence  with  the  humanistic  spirit, 
to  heal  the  immemorial  breach  between  the 
intellect  and  the  emotional  forces  of  life;  but  the 
confused  currents  of  the  time  were  too  strong  for 
them,  and  the  utmost  that  they  could  accomplish 
was  to  rough-sketch  the  design  of  a  true  civic 
order  and  leave  it  for  the  future  to  work  out. 
The  prophetic  idea  that  we  derive  from  them  is 
the  idea  of  a  city  with  laws  framed  for  the  ad- 
vancement of  the  arts  and  sciences,  a  city  domi- 
nated by  artistic  and  scientific  experts. 

Now  the  advancement  of  the  arts  and  sciences 
means  simply  the  bringing  of  human  nature  into 
more  agreeable  relations  with  the  nature  of  things. 
Stated  in  the  language  of  economics,  this  means 
raising  the  general  standard  of  living.  It  means 
increasing  the  purchasing  power  of  an  average 

101 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


day's  work.    It  means  raising  wages  and  lowering 
prices. 

The  astonishing  thing  about  our  industrial  order 
as  it  exists  is  that  there  is  as  yet  nowhere  to  be 
found  in  the  modern  world  such  a  thing  as  a  cor- 
poration devoted  to  the  increase  of  material  well- 
being  !  There  is  nowhere  a  corporation  organized 
and  worked  to  better  the  physical  standard  of  liv- 
ing. This  is  the  grand  oversight  of  modern  civili- 
zation and  the  most  damnatory  indictment  against 
our  industrial  order.  How  incredible  it  will  sound 
to  those  of  our  posterity  who  shall  endeavor  to 
find  grounds  of  admiration  for  the  past!  The 
nineteenth  century  —  they  will  be  told —  supposed 
itself  to  be  the  age  of  social  organization  for  the 
production  of  wealth,  yet  in  that  age  the  vast 
wealth  that  was  produced  was  all  in  spite  of  the 
social  organization;  for  the  law  left  the  initiative 
and  control  of  industry  wholly  in  the  hands  of 
those  whose  sole  credential  was  the  possession  of 
stocks,  bonds,  and  other  certificates  of  indebted- 
ness, and  the  sole  aim  of  whose  enterprise  was  to 
raise  prices  and  lower  wages  in  order  that  interest 
and  profits  might  be  increased.  They  will  be  told 
that  in  that  century  the  idea  of  doing  business  for 
the  sake  of  raising  the  standard  of  living  was  re- 
garded as  purely  sentimental.  In  a  word,  poster- 
ity will  discover  that  in  the  age  which  has  just 

102 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


passed  the  intellectual  forces  of  life  were  as  com- 
pletely, as  morbidly  divorced  from  the  emotional 
forces  as  in  any  of  the  darkest  and  sickest  periods 
of  history. 

Time  was  that  men  here  and  there  were  more 
capable  than  they  are  to-day  of  assessing  the  value 
of  a  sound  theory  —  of  seeing,  in  advance  of  a 
demonstration,  the  force  of  a  general  truth.  We 
have  nearly  lost  the  power  of  abstract  thinking; 
witness  the  decadence  of  theology,  whether  "  new  " 
or  "  old,"  and  the  driving  out  of  business  of  all 
those  who  seriously  undertake  to  help  the  people 
to  a  coherent  philosophy  of  life.  Our  pragmatical 
contemporaries  are  mostly  "  from  Missouri  "  and 
must  be  "  shown."  It  might  have  been  enough,  if 
the  general  psychological  conditions  were  different, 
to  go  abroad  preaching  the  gospel  of  the  uni- 
versity, trusting  the  feeling  mind  and  the  under- 
standing heart  to  discover  the  stupidity  and  cruelty 
of  the  social  theory  that  we  are  trying  to  live  by, 
and  to  establish  in  every  existing  town  and  city 
ward  an  institution  that  should  embody  the  re- 
generative university  idea  —  an  institution  that 
should  supersede  the  existing  religious  sects  and 
political  parties  by  an  organization  of  the  people 
in  the  spirit  of  the  university;  and  that  should 
replace  the  chaotic  misrule  of  professional  good- 
men  and  professional  smart-men  by  a  government 

103 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


of  those  effectual  civilizers  and  masters  of  arts 
who  had  proved  their  capacity  to  serve.  Certainly 
there  is  a  fighting  chance  to  make  over  the  old 
cities  on  this  new  plan  by  sheer  force  of  logic  and 
common  sense  in  spite  of  our  epidemic  myopia  of 
the  abstract  intellect.  But  as  things  stand  the  best 
way  to  give  currency  to  the  true  university  idea 
is  to  go  out  into  the  bare  places  and  build  a  fe*w 
university  cities  from  the  ground  up,  as  samples. 

A  city  is  substantially  "  free "  when  its  eco- 
nomic life  is  not  dominated  by  any  power  outside 
its  own  civic  organization.  To  this  end  a  munici- 
pal government  ought  to  have  primary  jurisdic- 
tion over  a  sufficient  area  of  land  to  support  its 
population.  The  proposition,  therefore,  is  to 
build  university  towns,  universities  whose  charters 
shall  be  municipal  charters,  and  set  them  the  task 
of  subduing  as  much  of  the  earth  as  they  can 
manage  —  say  a  million  or  two  acres  each,  some- 
thing over  forty  miles  square  —  by  the  exercise 
of  their  own  organic  civilizing  powers. 

The  university,  once  in  possession  of  its  land 
and  "  plant,"  should  be  self-sustaining.  It  should 
also  be  very  much  more  than  self-sustaining;  it 
should  by  its  own  creative  energies  furnish  the 
highest  artistic  and  scientific  conditions  of  social 
existence  now  anywhere  extant.  A  day's  work 
should  buy  more  there  than  elsewhere ;  thus  there 

104 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


would  be  set  up  a  rousing  inter-municipal  com- 
petition which  would  compel  all  neighboring 
cities  to  civilize  themselves  —  on  pain  of  the  loss 
of  population  and  the  decline  of  real  estate.  For 
the  city  which  can  maintain  a  higher  rate  of  wages 
and  a  lower  cost  of  living  than  its  competitors  must 
perforce  become  the  capital  of  the  world.  Nobody 
knows  how  high  the  organized  artistic  and  scien- 
tific enterprise  of  a  city  can  drive  wages,  or  how  low 
it  can  drive  prices  —  because  no  city  has  ever 
tried. 

American  universities  as  they  exist  are  the  alms- 
houses  of  the  arts  and  sciences.  The  creative  in- 
tellect is  pauperized  in  them  and  made  the  para- 
site of  the  artless,  scienceless  drudges  of  the  field 
and  workshop.  For  example,  the  University  of 
Texas  is  endowed  with  about  two  million  acres  of 
land.  Can  it  subdue  this  principally  to  the  uses 
of  the  human  ideal?  Are  the  masters  of  arts  in 
the  Texas  university  showing  the  'prentice  hands 
how  to  make  civility  and  grace  and  fair  dwellings 
and  laughing  waters  come  up  out  of  the  sagebrush 
plains?  Not  at  all.  The  lands  are  rackrented  for 
seventy  thousand  dollars  to  unregenerate  ranchmen 
and  mechanics;  and  with  that  sum  and  whatever 
else  can  be  begged  from  the  legislature  or  anybody 
else,  a  large  number  of  book-men  and  boys  are  sup- 
ported in  a  state  of  boredom  tempered  by  foot- 

105 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


ball,  in  order  that  the  toilers  of  Texas  may  nurse 
the  illusion  that  they  have  some  vicarious  part  and 
lot  in  the  wide  humanities.  It  is  the  same  nearly 
everywhere,  of  course ;  but  the  pathos  of  it  seems 
somehow  especially  poignant  in  Texas. 

America  is  threatened  with  a  deadly  class- 
struggle  between  the  money-power  and  the  mob. 
The  former  is  the  power  of  science  working  in 
abstraction  from  the  humanities;  the  latter  is  the 
energy  of  the  humanities  driven  blindly  without 
science.  To  take  sides  in  this  struggle  is  to  lose 
your  'vote.  Both  sides  are  sure  to  be  beaten  and 
would  lose  most  in  winning.  There  is  still  in  this 
country  a  whole-souled  contingent  that  is  neither 
proletarian  nor  plutocratic.  What  it  lacks  is  or- 
ganization and  a  programme.  Here  is  the  making 
of  a  prevailing  political  movement.  A  part  of  the 
programme  of  this  movement  should  be  the  crea- 
tion of  national  university  towns  on  the  public 
lands t  with  a  view  to  bringing  the  whole  fabric  of 
government  into  harmony  with  the  principles  that 
the  humanities  should  prevail  over  the  money- 
power ',  and  scientific  efficiency  over  the  crowd. 

In  February,  1911,  a  bill  was  introduced  in 
the  Senate  by  Mr.  Borah  for  the  establishment 
of  a  United  States  University.  It  should  be,  not  a 
socially  parasitic  academy  after  the  manner  of  the 
universities  with  which  we  are  already  too  familiar, 

106 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY  TOWNS 


but  a  self-sustaining  municipality  with  political 
jurisdiction  over  a  new  and  larger  District  of 
Columbia  on  the  right  bank  of  the  Potomac. 

The  national  Government  is  building  the 
Panama  Canal  and  schoolmastering  the  Filipinos. 
No  violence  will  be  done  to  constitutional  prec- 
edent if  now  that  Government  shall  undertake  to 
establish  a  genuine  university  in  Virginia  —  or  on 
the  desert  lands  of  the  West. 

The  desert  lands  are  the  best  lands  in  the 
country;  but  they  mock  at  private  initiative  and 
the  freebooting  money-maker.  That  is  a  provi- 
dential fact.  These  lands  have  been  reserved, 
without  human  foresight,  for  great  adventures 
in  corporate  civilization. 

We  need  to  be  reminded,  perhaps,  that  the 
famous  cities  of  the  antique  world  were  for  the 
most  part  founded  upon  the  practice  of  irrigation 
and  nursed  in  the  desert.  That  Old  World  was 
scientific  enough  to  prefer  its  rainless  lands — • 
Egypt  and  Palestine  —  Asia  Minor  and  Syria,  the 
land  of  the  Carthaginians  and  the  Moors,  of  the 
Incas  and  the  Aztecs.  The  simple  fact  seems  to  be 
that  the  soluble  plant  foods  —  potash,  lime,  mag- 
nesia, sulphuric  acid  and  so  on  —  are,  in  countries 
of  abundant  rainfall,  mainly  washed  away  and 
wasted;  while  in  arid  countries  these  elements 
accumulate  in  the  soil  an  inexhaustible  bank  account 

107 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


to  be  drawn  on,  without  possibility  of  protest  — 
through  irrigation  ditches.  There  is  expert  testi- 
mony to  the  effect  that  "  the  soils  that  lie  west  of 
the  hundredth  meridian  in  the  United  States,  as 
compared  with  those  that  lie  east  of  the  Missis- 
sippi, contain  on  the  average  about  three  times  as 
much  potash,  six  times  as  much  magnesia,  and  four- 
teen times  as  much  lime." 

So  the  new  university  cities  of  the  "  Great 
American  Desert "  would  have  solid  elemental 
underpinning. 

In  a  few  years  —  perhaps  a  few  months  — 
New  York,  Philadelphia  and  the  other  great  cities 
of  the  East  may  be  suffering  from  an  appalling 
problem  of  the  unemployed.  Under  existing  eco- 
nomic arrangements,  the  convulsions  that  are  called 
commercial  crises,  with  their  attendant  phenomena 
of  "  over-production  "  and  failure  of  credit,  are 
periodic  and  unavoidable.  For,  as  things  stand, 
mercantile  credit  is  based,  not  upon  technological 
or  value-producing  ability,  but  upon  ability  to 
collect  debts.  And  since  our  "  prosperity  "  consists 
very  largely  in  the  increasing  of  the  legally  en- 
forceable claims  of  the  creditor  class,  every  period 
of  commercial  expansion  is  bound  to  end  soon  or 
late  in  such  an  accumulation  of  bad  debts  and  in- 
digestible securities  as  shakes  everybody's  con- 
fidence in  the  bill-collector.  The  crisis  is  there- 

108 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


fore  a  part  of  the  system  and  may  be  counted 
on. 

Before  the  next  paroxysm  of  national  heart-fail- 
ure our  party  of  university  propaganda  should 
have  braced  the  public  mind  with  its  definite  pro- 
gramme for  the  alleviation  of  the  social  distress. 
It  should  demand  at  once  that  the  Government,  on 
the  completion  of  the  immense  irrigation  projects 
in  Arizona,  in  Colorado,  in  Idaho,  and  elsewhere, 
shall  not  try  to  peddle  out  the  redeemed  lands  to 
wandering  "  home-seekers,"  but  that  they  shall  be 
kept  in  bulk  and,  together  with  such  adjacent  public 
lands  as  may  be  available,  shall  be  made  —  like  the 
District  of  Columbia  —  the  sites  of  national  cities. 
The  demand  should  be  made  that  the  charters  of 
these  cities  should  be  framed  after  the  manner 
of  university  charters — establishing  self-perpetu- 
ating faculties  or  governing  corporations,  with 
powers  larger  indeed  than  those  of  the  commis- 
sioners who  manage  the  civic  affairs  of  the  national 
capital  city,  but  no  different  in  principle. 

The  new  university  corporations  should  include 
all  the  Burnhams,  McAdoos,  Pinchots,  and  Olm- 
steads,  the  General  Woods  and  Colonel  Roosevelts 
that  might  by  any  means  be  got  to  serve  —  not 
forgetting  such  specialists  as  Professor  Hilgard 
and  Mr.  Luther  Burbank,  of  California,  Mr. 
Elwood  Mead,  who  drew  up  the  irrigation  law 

109 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


code  of  Wyoming,  which  has  been  the  working- 
model  in  that  line  of  all  the  other  far  western 
States,  and  Mr.  William  E.  Smythe,  who  wrote 
that  luminous  and  prophetic  book,  "  The  Conquest 
of  Arid  America. " 

When  we  shall  have  put  in  full  charge  of  the 
several  land-tracts  corporations  composed  after 
this  manner,  and  shall  have  alloted  to  each  con- 
cern a  few  millions  of  dollars  from  the  national 
treasury  as  a  momentum-fund,  the  country  should 
say  to  them:  "  Go  ahead.  Build  cities  in  the 
university  spirit  and  teach  by  demonstration  how 
the  arts  and  sciences  may  be  advanced.  We  be- 
lieve in  you;  we  fetter  you  with  no  fine  theories 
of  the  rights  of  man;  you  are  under  no  law  but 
that  of  the  federal  courts  and  the  constitution  of 
the  universe.  Go  on  and  clear  spaces  in  which 
fine  goods  shall  be  cheaper  than  they  are  in  New 
York  and  common  men  dearer.  If  Shontz  or 
Stevens  or  the  Army  engineers  can  scoop  down 
the  mountains  at  the  Isthmus,  you  also  can  level  a 
few  lifts." 

The  immediate  effect  upon  an  era  of  commercial 
depression  of  an  enterprise  of  this  sort  may  be 
expected  to  be  as  stimulating  as  a  first-class  foreign 
war;  the  ultimate  effect  would  be  strikingly  dif- 
ferent, since,  instead  of  getting  the  mass  of  the 
people  into  debt,  it  would  get  them  out  of  it,  and 

no 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


instead  of  destroying  wealth  on  a  vast  scale,  it 
would  create  wealth  on  a  scale  as  vast.  The  effect 
would  be  as  if  half  a  score  of  World's  Fair  cities 
were  to  be  built  in  a  single  year  —  only  these 
should  be  cities  that  could  pay  their  own  freight; 
and  instead  of  crumbling  into  tinsel  and  plaster 
at  the  end  of  a  gaudy  show,  they  might  be  quite 
as  permanent  as  anything  earthly,  and  stand  — 
fair  as  the  city  of  Damascus  in  the  midst  of  its 
palm  gardens  and  flashing  streams — when  most 
that  is  now  called  American  had  passed  to  its  day 
of  judgment. 

In  these  establishments  the  guide-lines  of  prac- 
tical administration  should  be  derived  from  the 
lineaments  of  the  university  —  in  its  original  and 
normal  idea.  The  university  is  at  bottom  relig- 
ious; it  has  a  gospel  that  preaches  the  unity  and 
reasonableness  of  the  ground-plan  of  the  world. 
It  is  actuated  by  a  faith  that  the  laws  of  science 
are  framed  to  match  the  laws  of  art  —  that  all 
material  things  are  plastic  under  the  hand  of  an 
insistent  ideal.  Thus  the  university  as  a  physical 
institution  should  be  to  the  new  towns  what  the 
cathedral  was  to  the  mediaeval  cities  of  Europe. 

The  university  in  its  true  character  offers  pro- 
motion and  an  expanding  career  on  one  single 
condition  —  to  wit :  the  achievement  of  some  kind 
of  value-producing  efficiency.  Its  organization, 

in 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


therefore,  should  develop  an  ascending  scale  of 
ranks  in  which  one  might  hope  to  become  more 
commanding  only  by  becoming  more  serviceable. 
The  servants  should  rule.  They  should  not  merely 
be  permitted  to  serve;  they  have  an  authoritative 
and  indefeasible  right  to  rule. 

The  men  who  know  how  to  bring  human  nature 
into  fruitful  and  victorious  relations  with  the 
nature  of  things  are  an  authentic  democratic  aris- 
tocracy, and  must  not,  if  they  can  help  it,  permit 
themselves  to  be  overruled  by  mere  numbers.  This 
is  a  social  principle  that  lies  in  the  very  marrow 
of  the  university  ideal.  It  antagonizes  our  heredi- 
tary political  prejudices,  to  be  sure ;  yet  not  it,  but 
they,  must  eventually  give  way.  The  principle  in 
fine  is  this :  In  a  sound  industrial  society  the  higher 
rank  should  elect  the  lower,  not  the  lower  the 
higher.  The  track-walker  should  not  elect  the 
section-boss,  but  contrariwise.  Only  the  efficient 
are  qualified  to  judge  of  a  candidate's  efficiency. 
The  violation  of  this  principle  seems  to  be  the 
cause  of  the  failure  of  most  so-called  co-operative 
experiments.  It  is  the  radical  flaw  in  the  proleta- 
rian programme  of  "  scientific  socialism."  It  would 
seem  safe  to  say  that  American  city-making  can 
never  become  artistic  and  scientific  so  long  as  we 
cleave  to  the  tradition  of  the  sovereignty  of  ma- 
jorities ;  and  that  the  reason  why  the  city  of  Wash- 

112 


NATIONAL    UNIVERSITY   TOWNS 


ington  is  so  incomparably  better  governed  than 
any  other  city  in  the  United  States  is  that  it  is  the 
only  city  in  the  country  that  is  not  governed  by 
plebiscite.  Majority-rule  has  indeed  a  revolution- 
ary value;  it  is  the  only  possible  counterpoise  to 
the  tyranny  of  entrenched  incompetents.  But 
when  once  a  society  has  found  its  equilibrium  in 
a  sound  industrial  order,  it  seems  to  be  certain  that 
the  rule  of  kings  and  the  rule  of  crowds  must  fall 
into  contempt  together.  Yet,  the  whole  exemplary 
value  of  these  new  adventures  would  depend  upon 
their  being  locally  self-governed;  their  corpora- 
tions, once  established,  should  have  unrestricted 
power  to  recruit  themselves  from  their  own 
citizenship. 

There  is  a  prospect  that  pure  science  would 
receive  an  unprecedented  impetus  from  universi- 
ties of  this  new  type.  It  is  certainly  a  mistake  to 
suppose  that  science  in  its  larger  and  more  specu- 
lative scope  is  best  advanced  when  laboratory 
work  and  original  research  are  carried  on  in  a 
subsidized  social  vacuum  and  in  utter  aloofness 
from  practical  affairs.  The  whole  history  of  scien- 
tific progress  points  in  an  opposite  direction,  and 
goes  to  show  that  the  largest  accessions  of  knowl- 
edge and  a  true  scientific  philosophy  are  likely  to 
come  from  a  university  that  is  enmeshed  in  an  in- 
dustrial order  and  whose  atmosphere  is  aflame  with 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


a  passion  for  social  progress.  Why  is  it  that 
the  scientific  method  burgeoned  for  a  brilliant 
season  in  Athens,  in  Alexandria,  and  in  Syracuse 
—  and  then  died  for  a  thousand  years?  It  was 
because  Aristotle  and  Galen  and  Hipparchus  and 
Ptolemy  and  Archimedes  despised  economics  and 
the  social  problem  and  disdained  to  apply  their 
science  to  the  material  enrichment  of  the  world; 
and  because  the  society  in  which  they  lived  was 
utterly  devoid  of  an  industrial  organization  that 
could  economize  scientific  ideas. 

Plutarch  tells  how  King  Hiero  entreated  Archi- 
medes almost,  though  not  quite,  in  vain,  "  to  turn 
his  art  from  abstracted  notions  to  matters  of  sense, 
and  to  make  his  reasonings  more  intelligible  to  the 
generality  of  mankind  by  applying  them  to  the 
uses  of  common  life."  And  he  says  also  that  Plato 
inveighed  against  Eudoxus  and  Archytas,  who 
made  some  feeble  efforts  to  translate  their  geome- 
try into  terms  of  mechanics,  "  inveighed  against 
them  with  great  indignation,  as  corrupting  the  ex- 
cellence of  geometry  by  making  her  descend  from 
incorporeal  and  intellectual  to  corporeal  and  sen- 
sible things. "  If  there  are  savants  nowadays  that 
could  not  interest  themselves  in  such  universities 
as  are  proposed,  they  belong  by  moral  consan- 
guinity, not  to  this  age,  but  to  that  of  Plato.  The 
representative  scientists  of  to-day  are  also  masters 

114 


NATIONAL   UNIVERSITY  TOWNS 


of  creative  arts — men  of  the  stamp  of  Lord  Kel- 
vin and  Thomas  Edison,  who  have  made  electricity 
a  familiar  tool;  Pasteur,  who  left  his  laboratory 
to  destroy  hog-cholera  and  cattle-plague;  and  the 
late  Professor  Bertellot,  who  managed  an  experi- 
mental farm  in  the  environs  of  Paris.  Possibly  our 
national  universities  might  furnish  for  the  work 
of  such  men  the  best  milieu  that  can  be  imagined. 

The  president  of  the  Territorial  University  of 
Arizona,  at  Tucson,  was  asked  why  athletics  do 
not  flourish  in  that  institution.  He  said:  "The 
faculty  here  have  gone  in  for  the  regular  sports 
that  are  in  vogue  in  Eastern  colleges,  and  have 
tried  to  interest  the  students  in  that  sort  of  thing. 
But  it  is  no  use;  the  boys  have  absorbed  their 
minds  in  a  bigger  game  than  foot-ball,  the  game 
of  besting  this  desert  here  with  the  tools  of  science. 
And  they  are  away  every  holiday  with  the  engi- 
neers and  irrigators  —  to  the  bottoms  of  mines 
and  the  tops  of  mountains  —  training  for  the 
Match." 

So  it  would  seem  that  the  city-building  university 
idea,  which  has  lain  so  long  in  the  ground,  has 
already  sprouted. 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


XI 

THE   SPIRITUAL   INTEGRATION 

OF  THE   NEW  INDUSTRIAL 

ORDER 

THE  building  of  free  university  towns  in  the 
manner  suggested  in  the  last  chapter  is,  of 
course,  not  indispensable  to  the  new  order  of 
things;  there  are  other  ways.  Whether  by  na- 
tional coup  de  main  or  by  slower  interior  processes 
of  municipal  regeneration,  the  new  social  ideal 
must  before  long  get  itself  an  embodiment.  Our 
industrial  society  must  somehow  achieve  its  unity 
and  integrity.  The  modern  free  city  must  nucleate 
its  creative  and  earth-conquering  life  in  a  university 
of  the  people  that  shall  be  as  inclusive  of  all  ideal 
interests  as  was  the  cathedral  church  in  the  free 
cities  of  the  Middle  Age. 

It  was  said  by  the  Italian  Manzoni  that  when 
democracy  shall  become  a  religion,  it  will  trans- 
form the  face  of  the  world.  We  in  America  have 
always  understood  that  there  is  something  in  the 
genius  of  this  Western  land  that  is  not  contained 
in  political  contrivances  or  to  be  accounted  for  in 

116 


SPIRITUAL   INTEGRATION   OF    NEW   ORDER 

secular  terms;  that  America  has  some  sort  of  a 
regenerative  mission  to  the  whole  world.  But  our 
conception  of  these  things  has  not  been  precise. 

Certainly  we  have  been  sure  that  the  faith  that 
lies  unuttered  in  the  soul  of  the  Nation  is  not  a 
sectarian  religion.  And  the  course  of  contempo- 
rary history  in  England,  in  France,  in  Spain  and 
Portugal,  and  throughout  the  world  fortifies  us  in 
the  persuasion  that  professional  religion  of  what- 
ever kind  is  doomed  to  die.  But  does  this  mean 
that  the  real  faith  of  men  is  weakening,  that  ideal- 
ism is  passing  as  a  dream  and  that  the  universal 
heart  is  growing  cold?  No.  The  fact  is  that 
the  ecclesiastical  establishments  are  not  religious 
enough  to  contain  the  man  of  the  modern  spirit. 

Religion  is  at  bottom  the  feeling  of  the  over- 
whelming potency  of  what  is  right.  It  is  the 
conviction  that  the  ideal  is  practical,  and  that 
nothing  else  is.  The  spiritual  enfeeblement  of  the 
churches  follows  from  the  fact  that  they  have  with- 
drawn from  the  earth-struggle. 

It  is  said  that  men  stop  going  to  church  when 
they  cease  to  be  afraid  of  hell.  The  statement  is 
hardly  accurate;  for  men  can  never  cease  to  fear 
that  which  is  the  opposite  of  their  hope,  can  never 
cease  to  be  afraid  of  a  hell  of  some  sort  —  a  real 
and  terrible  perdition.  Thomas  Carlyle  had  it  in 
his  day  that  the  hell  that  was  really  dreaded  was 

117 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


that  of  "  not  making  money."  Certainly  it  was  a 
dreadful  thing  to  fall  into  the  abyss  of  poverty  in 
his  Manchester  mills  or  East  London.  Yet  it  is 
possible  that  Carlyle  never  quite  understood  the 
real  passion  and  terror  of  his  contemporaries;  he 
lived  too  much  in  his  study  and  in  the  past.  The 
fear  that  had  really  begun  to  lurk  at  the  bottom  of 
men's  hearts  in  those  days  of  the  rise  of  modern 
industrialism  in  England  and  America  was  not 
wholly  a  fear  of  not  making  money;  it  was  partly 
a  fear  .of  not  "making  good."  The  ideal  forces 
of  the  world  had  suddenly  been  turned  from  the 
pursuit  of  religious  and  political  abstractions  to  the 
concrete  problems  of  economic  production.  For 
the  first  time  in  history  men  began  to  prosecute 
their  material  business  with  a  crusading  zeal.  And 
from  that  day  to  this  a  new  kind  of  hell  has  been 
enlarging  its  borders  —  the  hell  of  being  of  no  use 
to  the  universe,  and  therefore  doomed  to  pass  out 
of  existence. 

The  representative  sort  of  modern  men  cannot 
believe  in  unconditional  immortality — or  in  any 
thing  else  unconditional.  It  is  perceived  that 
everything  stands  through  its  relations  with  every- 
thing else.  It  follows  that  if  a  man  would  live  an 
endless  life,  he  must  inextricably  implicate  himself 
in  the  world's  affairs.  Mental  abstraction  is  the 
shadow  of  death  and  self -absorption  is  progressive 

118 


SPIRITUAL   INTEGRATION   OF    NEW   ORDER 

annihilation.  Such,  at  all  events,  is  the  conviction 
that  is  settling  in  the  modern  heart.  It  is  this 
persuasion  that  is  destroying  the  leisure  class. 
Men  are  compelled  "  to  leap  from  their  seats  and 
contend  for  their  lives."  The  moral  law  —  the 
law  that  one  must  function  well  in  society  —  is 
seen  to  be  self- vindicating;  you  must  respect  it 
or  it  will  kill  you. 

How  lax  and  negligible  are  the  casuistries  of 
the  old  creeds  —  tugging  at  dull  consciences  with 
a  cord  two  thousand  years  long  —  in  comparison 
with  this  tremendous  truth  of  the  modern  con- 
sciousness, pressing  upon  us  like  an  atmosphere  — 
fifteen  pounds  to  the  square  inch ! 

Not  to  "  make  good  "  is  hell.  And  what  do  we 
mean  by  u  making  good  "?  That  it  is  a  different 
thing  from  making  money  is  evidenced  by  the  cy- 
clone of  social  disapproval  that  is  now  circling 
about  the  heads  of  the  conspicuously  rich.  Cer- 
tainly it  is  the  judgment  of  their  contemporaries 
that  they  have  not  "  delivered  the  goods  "  at  least, 
not  in  bulk  and  quality  to  match  their  talents  and 
opportunities.  The  complaint  against  them  is  that 
they  have  not  implicated  their  own  interests  in 
those  of  the  commonwealth  —  that  they  have  been 
self-absorbed. 

To  do  something  that  helps  to  make  life  more 
livable  upon  the  earth,  to  lend  a  hand  in  the  Titanic 

119 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


struggle  of  the  race — its  striving  to  make  the 
human  spirit  at  home  in  the  real  world  —  that  is 
already  the  esoteric  aim  of  American  business; 
and  the  day  has  come  when  this  secret  doctrine 
must  be  spoken  aloud.  The  idea  of  public-spirited- 
ness  as  a  grace  to  be  achieved  after  office  hours  is 
a  tradition  of  our  fathers  which  we  have  decided  to 
discontinue.  Frock-coated  philanthropy  is  nearly 
a  thing  of  the  past.  The  religion  of  democracy  — 
the  religion  of  sensible  men  —  knows  not  how  to 
run  a  knife-blade  between  its  egotism  and  its  al- 
truism, its  realism  and  its  idealism;  they  are  in- 
extricably mixed  together.  What  we  want  is  life, 
and  more  abundant  life;  and  we  know  that  we 
can  get  it  only  by  playing  fair  and  friendly  at  the 
world's  great  game.  Can  there  be  any  doubt  that 
there  soon  must  rise  a  temple  of  this  nameless 
faith? 

Social  unity  depends  upon  the  general  agreement 
of  the  most  forceful  people  as  to  what  is  the  cri- 
terion of  right.  A  society  can  move  and  act  with 
clearness  only  when  there  is  a  fair  consensus  of  its 
members  in  their  moral  ideal.  Modern  society 
staggers  and  wastes  itself  because  it  has  not  yet 
achieved  this  consensus.  Broadly  speaking,  the 
irreconcilable  moralities  that  distract  us  and  tear 
our  social  tissue  are  just  three.  For  the  sake  of 
simplicity,  let  us  call  these  three  codes  respectively 

120 


SPIRITUAL   INTEGRATION   OF    NEW   ORDER 

the  morality  of  the  priest,  the  morality  of  the  poli- 
tician, and  the  morality  of  the  engineer.  These 
three  types  are  ethically  unintelligible  to  one  an- 
other; they  use  the  word  "  right"  in  totally  dif- 
ferent senses.  To  the  professional  religious  per- 
son "right"  always  has  an  accent  of  self-denial; 
"  to  do  right  "  means  to  do  something  that  is  more 
or  less  offensive  to  taste  and  instinct,  something 
that  is  disagreeable  to  do.  To  the  professional 
political  person,  on  the  other  hand,  "  right  "  is 
synonymous  with  self-assertion;  a  man's  political 
rights  are  his  claims  and  pretensions.  But  the 
morality  of  the  engineer  (the  typical  man  of  the 
new  industrial  order)  is  contemptuous  both  of  self-  \ 
denials  and  self-assertions.  It  is  purely  objective.  ' 
An  engineer  figures  out,  for  example,  the  stress  to 
which  a  girder  is  to  be  subjected,  and  if  it  will 
stand  the  strain,  he  says,  "  I  have  got  it  right !  " 
Now  this  morality  of  the  engineer  is  simply  the 
spiritual  principle  of  art  ancL  science;  it  fits  a  man 
to  be  not  only  an  engineer,  but  also  an  artist  and  a 
gentleman  —  which  the  two  contrasting  moralities 
do  not.  The  true  solution  of  the  ethical  problem 
is  that  a  man  should  escape  from  his  subjective 
mind;  complete  objectivity  is  pure  spirituality. 

The  dissolving  of  our  social  doubts  and  contra- 
dictions is  to  be  accomplished  by  building  shrines 
to  the  Eternal  Right  of  the  engineer  and  the  artist 

121 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


(the  right  that  judges  the  tree  by  its  fruit,  the 
singer  by  his  song,  the  worker  by  his  works)  and 
by  bringing  the  priests  and  the  politicians  to  re- 
nounce their  morals  and  worship  there. 

When  it  is  urged  that  the  university  of  the 
people  should  be  not  only  educational,  but  also 
religious  and  political,  that  it  should  absorb  into 
itself  the  offices  that  are  now  given  over  to  institu- 
tions that  specialize  in  religion  and  politics,  we  are 
told  that  such  a  proposal  is  reactionary,  that  it 
runs  counter  to  the  evolutionary  tendency  toward 
variety  of  function  and  the  division  of  labor.  The 
objection  proceeds  upon  a  complete  misunder- 
standing of  the  principle  of  social  specialization. 
Social  evolution  demands  infinite  differentiation 
in  the  field  of  practical  enterprise  —  workers  of 
innumerable  kinds ;  but  this  differentiation  of  func- 
tion must  be  accompanied  by  an  integration  of 
will  and  purpose,  a  gathering  unity  in  the  sphere  of 
the  social  ideal.  In  other  words,  true  and  useful 
specialization  requires  that  society  shall  have 
singleness  of  aim.  The  more  specialized  men  are 
in  their  practical  affairs  the  less  specialized  must 
they  be  in  their  ideals.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  more  we  specialize  in  the  sphere  of  the  ideal 
(the  greater  the  number  of  sects,  schools  of 
thought,  and  political  parties)  the  less  capable 
shall  we  be  of  individualizing  our  day's  work.  A 

122 


SPIRITUAL  INTEGRATION   OF  NEW  ORDER 

city  filled  with  jangling  sects  and  parties  can  never 
achieve  a  high  industrial  organization.  The  ex- 
quisite division  of  labor  which  built  the  cathedrals 
of  mediaeval  Europe  was  made  possible  by  social 
single-mindedness.  The  people  agreed  in  faith 
and  morals. 

The  most  imperative  demand  of  a  practical  age 
—  the  demand  of  this  age  because  it  is  more  practi- 
cal than  any  other  —  is  the  fusion  of  its  ideal  insti- 
tutions, the  identification  of  the  institutions  of 
religion,  politics,  and  education. 

Education  is  the  synthetic  term  standing  be- 
tween what  is  sane  in  religion  and  what  is  sound 
in  politics  —  and  drawing  these  two  things  to- 
gether. This  is  implied  in  the  revolution  now  cur- 
rent in  all  the  realms  of  pedagogy.  Education 
everywhere  is  becoming  on  the  one  hand  more 
idealistic,  more  respectful  of  the  spiritual  individu- 
ality of  the  learner,  and  on  the  other  hand  more 
practical  —  more  technological.  It  is  the  grand 
lesson  of  the  age  that  spirituality  and  practicality 
are  correlative;  that  we  cannot  have  one  without 
the  other.  In  the  industrial  republic  education 
must  be  both  religious  and  political.  Of  course 
there  is  a  kind  of  religion  and  a  kind  of  politics 
that  has  no  place  in  the  university  or  the  public 
school.  But  religion  of  that  description  is  a  spirit- 
ual dissipation,  and  such  politics  a  public  nuisance. 

123 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


The  need  of  the  integration  of  the  social  will 
as  the  sine  qua  non  of  high  industrial  organization 
and  social  progress  ought  to  be  evident  from  a 
general  consideration  of  the  principles  of  biologic 
evolution.  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  dictum,  that  life 
in  its  advance  moves  "  from  indefinite  and  inco- 
herent homogeneity  to  definite  and  coherent  het- 
erogeneity," is  a  statement  that  fairly  covers  the 
case.  This  theorem,  applied  to  the  field  of  so- 
ciology, means  that  if  we  would  have  high  civiliza- 
tion with  its  "  heterogeneity,"  its  infinite  variety  of 
offices  and  ministries,  society  must  cohere  at  the 
heart,  must  be  definite  and  simple  in  its  motive. 

If  we  prefer  indefiniteness  of  ideals,  incoherence 
at  the  centres  of  social  vitality,  we  must  content 
ourselves  with  sameness  of  occupation  and  must 
forego  the  delights  of  artistic  individuality  and  a 
delicate  adjustment  of  reciprocities.  The  advance 
to  a  material  civilization,  more  refined,  more  vari- 
ous and  more  free,  requires  that  the  church,  the 
university,  and  the  political  primary  shall  be  tele- 
scoped into  a  single  institution. 


124 


THE  COMMUNISM    OF   THE   INTELLECT 


XII 

THE  COMMUNISM   OF  THE 
INTELLECT 

"  T?ORMERLY>"  said  Bonaparte,  "  there  was 
J7  but  one  description  of  property  —  the  pos- 
session of  land;  but  now  a  new  property  has  risen 
up  —  namely,  industry.'7  Say  rather  that  the  new 
property  is  the  ownership  of  industrial  power. 
The  industrial  power  of  a  society  is  the  sum  of  its 
artistic  and  scientific  capabilities.  This  is  the  chief 
hereditament  of  civilization;  it  consists  of  a  pre- 
cious complex  of  talents  bred  into  a  race.  It  is  an 
intellectual  estate  in  which  every  member  of  society 
has  equitably  an  undivided  interest.  This  estate  in 
the  solid  things  of  the  mind  is  by  rights  a  good  half 
of  the  common  wealth  of  a  people — the  land  being 
the  other  half.  And  as  every  man  should  be  re- 
garded as  a  land-holder,  in  virtue  of  his  existence 
—  so  also  he  should  be  a  sharer  in  the  usufruct  of 
this  invaluable  transmitted  and  accumulated  power. 
There  never  has  been  any  sound  statesmanship 
save  that  which  has  known  how  to  husband  and 
increase  in  the  people  this  power.  The  trade  of 

125 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


politics  has  for  the  most  part  been  intellectually 
contemptible  because  of  its  waste  and  neglect  of 
the  estate  of  social  creative  ability  —  as  Colbert's 
great  system  of  manufactures  was  destroyed  im- 
mediately after  his  death  by  the  ecclesiocratic  poli- 
ticians who  scattered  the  Huguenot  craftsmen. 

Now  the  root  of  social  iniquity  is  in  the  embez- 
zlement from  the  mass  of  the  people  of  their  right 
and  interest  in  the  artistic  and  scientific  compe- 
tencies —  the  intellectual  estate  that  has  accumu- 
lated in  the  race.  The  new  power  of  which 
Napoleon  spoke  was  the  control  of  this  kingdom 
of  effectual  ideas  by  industrial  magnates  acting  in 
their  own  private  interest.  Their  method  was  the 
monopoly  of  commercial  credit.  Thus  arose  the 
aristocracy  of  the  bourgeoisie  until  it  over-balanced 
the  aristocracy  of  land-holders,  the  old  nobilities. 
And  a  new  era  was  begun.  The  era  has  been 
called  the  age  of  capitalism  —  but  that  is  not  truly 
descriptive.  The  age  which  began  with  the  French 
Revolution,  and  is  now  coming  to  its  end,  has  been, 
in  its  most  striking  characteristic,  the  age  of  the 
private  ownership  of  knowledge  —  the  monopoly 
of  the  things  of  the  mind.  Men  have  bought  and 
sold  each  other's  brains,  wrestling  for  the  control 
of  the  artistic-scientific  social  estate  —  society's 
power  to  create  values  —  exactly  as  the  great 
feudalists  of  the  former  age  battled  for  the  pos- 

126 


THE  COMMUNISM   OF   THE   INTELLECT 

session  of  the  land.  To  the  land-lords  succeeded 
the  brain-lords,  the  masters  of  all  the  intellectual 
heritage  of  civilization,  with  power  to  turn  the 
people  out  of  these  commons  and  fence  them  in. 

The  magnate  of  the  passing  age  has  owed  his 
authority  not  to  the  fact  that  he  has  been  a  tool- 
holder  —  a  capitalist.  For  if  all  the  tools  —  all 
the  material  means  and  instruments  of  wealth- 
production —  were  to  be  swept  out  of  existence  by 
some  convulsion  of  nature,  on  the  day  after  the 
calamity  the  power  of  the  lord  of  brains  would  be 
found  to  be  unimpaired.  To  him  would  the  whole 
community  resort,  with  all  its  diverse  skills  and 
accomplishments,  and  crave  permission  to  bring  its 
forces  together  for  the  work  of  restoring  the 
frame  of  civilization.  And  the  community  could 
not  realize  upon  its  estate  of  ideal  goods  —  its 
treasure  of  productive  power  locked  in  its  heart  — 
without  the  will  and  initiative  of  its  lord.  Over 
all  minds  of  craftsmen,  artists,  and  engineers  he 
would  exercise  such  a  spell,  such  an  enchantment, 
that  none  would  dare  turn  a  good  thought  into  a 
productive  deed  until  the  master  of  minds  should 
say,  "  Go  on."  The  talisman  of  this  marvellous 
authority  would  be,  perhaps,  a  strongbox,  filled 
with  certificates  of  indebtedness  —  bonds,  mort- 
gages and  so  on  —  claims  against  society,  enforce- 
able by  law.  In  this  mystical,  this  purely  psycho- 

127 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


logical  fact  of  the  possession  of  an  accumulation  of 
legal  credits,  which  the  people  should  feel  spiritu- 
ally bound  to  enforce  against  themselves,  would 
inhere  the  sovereignty  of  the  brain-lord,  the  grand 
seigneur  of  the  people's  intellectual  estate. 

In  the  social  order  that  is  passing  the  great  com- 
mercial creditor  alone  has  had  power  to  effect  that 
correlation  of  working  minds  which  is  the  source 
and  essence  of  all  material  civilization.  In  the 
absence  of  a  public  organization  for  the  economiz- 
ing and  safeguarding  of  the  people's  artistic  and 
scientific  heritage  —  its  inherited  skill  of  associated 
work,  its  precious  accumulation  of  effective  knowl- 
edge—  this  heritage  has  been  made  the  loot  and 
spoil  of  successful  traders. 

Now  the  university  stands  for  the  idea  of  social 
unity  to  be  achieved  by  a  high  kind  of  communism, 
a  communism  not  in  material  things,  but  in  the 
things  of  the  mind.  The  kind  of  social  or- 
der toward  which  the  university  tends  is  one 
that  has  abolished  that  power  of  fraud  which 
lies  in  the  egotism  of  the  intellect.  It  is  an  order 
which  looks  upon  the  private  advantage  gained 
by  a  superior  intelligence  over  an  inferior  one 
as  an  embezzlement  of  public  property  —  on  the 
ground  that  all  have  an  equal  and  vested  interest 
in  the  truth.  In  such  a  society  the  intellect  of  the 
individual  will  work  untrammelled  in  all  the 

128 


THE  COMMUNISM   OF   THE   INTELLECT 

processes  whereby  truth  is  elicited;  there  must  be, 
in  this  sense,  the  freest  intellectual  competition. 
But  all  the  private  gains  of  knowledge  must  be 
brought  into  a  common  store,  and  the  whole  social 
energy  must  go  to  the  enforcement  of  the  truth 
that  has  gained  public  cognizance.  This  is  the 
idea  of  the  university,  this  publicizing  of  all  facts 
of  common  interest,  in  order  to  break  up  the 
monopolies  that  are  based  upon  the  suppression  of 
truth. 

The  university  is  the  voluntary  association  of 
those  who  have  no  trade-secrets,  and  are  deter- 
mined to  enlist  the  force  of  law  to  destroy  the 
power  of  egotistic  intellect.  For  what  is  science 
but  public  knowledge,  knowledge  meant  for  and 
belonging  to  all  men?  And  what  is  art  but  work 
that  is  public  in  its  motive,  addressing  itself  to  the 
human  spirit  of  all  conditions? 

A  man  may  be  said  to  think  and  act  in  the  spirit 
of  the  university  only  when  he  has  ceased  to  de- 
pend for  his  success  upon  the  tricks  of  his  trade, 
and  has  committed  himself  with  faith  and  daring 
to  the  things  of  the  open  air  and  the  open  heart, 
trusting  wholly  to  the  artistic  and  scientific  value 
of  his  product.  All  professions  are  corrupted  by 
esoterism  and  purified  by  publicity.  A  charlatan 
makes  a  mystery  of  his  trade;  a  master  rejoices 
in  intelligibleness. 

129 


THE   UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


The  university  of  the  people  is  an  association 
devoted  to  whole-heartedness  and  simplicity,  to 
the  discovery  and  enjoyment  of  the  real  world. 
Its  covenant  is  candor,  fortified  by  faith  in  God 
and  man  —  a  faith  that  all  the  hard  facts  of  nature 
are  salutary  and  amenable  to  reason. 

We  must  come  to  understand  that  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  poor,  and  of  the  rich  also  —  the  con- 
fusion of  our  actual  society,  its  incompetence  in 
the  earth-struggle  and  its  blindness  to  beauty,  are 
not  due  to  any  intrinsic  weakness  of  human  nature, 
but  solely  to  the  fact  that  we  have  not  yet  got 
together  in  the  truth  or  for  the  truth.  The  civil 
law  under  which  we  live  is  based  upon  the  princi- 
ple of  intellectual  monopoly,  the  supposed  right 
of  every  man  to  make  a  private  and  exclusive  use 
of  his  knowledge.  The  public  school,  in  its  ideal 
and  ground-plan,  is  a  standing  witness  against 
this  inherited  egotism,  but  it  is,  so  far,  a  nearly 
impotent  witness  —  because  children  do  not  rule 
the  world.  It  is  impossible  for  infants  to  work 
out  the  social  implications  of  the  public  school. 
The  child-heart  needs  a  man's  will  to  make  it 
effectual.  And  the  children  leave  the  schools  be- 
fore they  become  men.  Then  they  grow  up  and  re- 
ceive their  convincing  lessons  in  the  ways  of  the 
world's  business,  in  an  atmosphere  that  is  saturated 
with  the  reek  of  the  sweat  of  a  'desperate  game. 

130 


THE  COMMUNISM   OF   THE   INTELLECT 

The  public  school  stands  for  the  catholicity  of  in- 
tellectual power.  Its  proclamation  is  that  the  whole 
truth  is  for  all  alike,  that  no  one  shall  take  ad- 
vantage of  the  ignorance  of  another.  Spite  of  the 
weakness  of  children,  great  things  might  come  of 
this,  after  awhile  and  in  the  long  run,  if  the  procla- 
mation were  plainly  written  to  be  plainly  read. 
But  the  school  cannot  shut  out  the  world,  and  the 
world  of  crafty  trade  presses  into  the  class-room 
by  every  door  and  window  —  to  sophisticate  the 
message.  Thus  the  children  sit  from  year  to 
year  in  the  light  of  a  world-renewing  evangel,  and 
they  do  not  merely  forget  it;  they  never  once  have 
come  to  understand  it.  The  gospel  of  the  public 
school  is  that  the  truth  is  for  all  alike  and  no  one 
shall  take  advantage  of  another's  ignorance.  But 
what  gets  lodged  in  the  mind  of  the  child  may  be 
something  entirely  different  —  to  wit:  That  all 
shall  have  a  fighting  chance  to  seize  upon  the 
truth  and  carry  it  away  as  a  prize !  For  this  is 
the  doctrine  of  our  hereditary  law. 

Democracy  is  communism  in  the  truth.  It  is 
not  communism  in  goods  and  chattels,  not  the 
abolishment  of  private  property.  So  far  as  pri- 
vate property  can  justify  itself  as  useful  for  the 
advancement  of  art  and  science  —  it  shall  stand 
and  be  strengthened.  But  democracy  hates 
cunning  and  circumvention;  it  will  make  an  end 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


of  all  the  privileges  that  flow  from  secrecy  and 
subterfuge. 

The  new  order  is  a  communism  in  science  and 
art.  But  it  is  not  enough  that  the  gifts  of  art  and 
science  should  be  passively  offered  to  all  —  the 
Muses  singing  in  open,  sunlit  cloisters.  That  is 
good,  but  it  is  not  enough.  The  creative  intel- 
lect is  not  merely  a  white  still  light.  It  is  also  a 
living  flame.  Intellectual  power  is  passion  heated 
to  incandescence.  It  is  an  energy  and  a  propa- 
ganda. It  is  government  —  it  is  law.  Minerva 
is  armed;  the  university  is  militant.  The  symbol 
of  the  liberty  which  it  proclaims  to  the  world  is 
a  figure  of  Truth  with  a  flaming  light  in  one  hand 
and  in  the  other  a  naked  sword!  The  university 
of  the  people  contends  for  the  possession  of  the 
police-power;  it  fights  for  the  throne. 

So  then  a  genuine  democracy  is  to  arise  out  of 
a  militant  university,  a  political  power  that  shall 
execute  the  law  in  the  spirit  of  the  arts  and  sci- 
ences. It  shall  destroy  the  monopolies  of  greed 
and  craft  and  make  the  candid  truth  a  great  force 
among  men. 


UNIVERSITY MISTRESS   OF  MARKET 


XIII 

THE   UNIVERSITY  —  MISTRESS 
OF   THE    MARKET 

THE  true  interpretation  of  "  the  square 
deal "  is  that  it  is  the  special  and  principal 
office  of  government  to  enforce  the  equality  of  all 
bargains.  Thus  ambitious  enterprise  must  be 
diverted  from  the  field  of  exchange  to  that  of 
industry,  from  the  business  of  buying  and  selling 
to  that  of  producing  goods. 

Socialists  say  that  the  social  disease  is  private 
initiative  and  free  competition  in  the  supply  of  the 
market.  They  are  mistaken.  The  disease  is  the 
lack  of  public  organization  of  the  market  itself. 
What  we  need  is  not  public  organization  of  pro- 
duction, but  the  public  control  of  exchanges.  It 
is  neither  necessary,  nor  desirable,  nor  even  toler- 
able, that  we  should  politicize  supply ;  but  it  is 
indispensable  to  progress  that  we  should  publicize 
demand. 

The  evil  of  "the  system"  as  it  exists  is  that  it 
makes  the  credit  upon  which  the  initiative  of  in- 
dustry depends  flow  from  the  people's  debts  or 

133 


THE   UNIVERSITY  MILITANT 


necessities,  instead  of  from  their  demands  or  de- 
sires. Thus  commodities  are  produced  without 
any  regard  to  effective  demand  or  buying  power. 
Hence  come  u  over-production  "  and  every  man- 
ner of  industrial  dislocation.  What  is  needed  is 
artistic  and  scientific  organization  of  the  market. 
In  a  genuine  industrial  society  the  enforcement 
of  equality  of  values  in  exchange  must  come  to  be 
the  primary  office  of  public  law. 

The  establishment  of  such  an  organization  of 
the  market  would  not  abolish  productive  compe- 
tition, but  accelerate  it.  Under  existing  conditions 
there  is  in  fact  no  true  productive  competition  — 
no  competition  for  competency,  or  rivalry  in 
public  service.  The  existing  competition  is  for 
the  control  of  the  market.  Thus  the  public  organi- 
zation of  the  market  would  not  do  away  with 
competition,  but  would  reverse  its  aim  —  would 
stop  the  struggle  for  price-fixing  power  and  throw 
men  back  upon  that  struggle  for  existence  that  is 
normal  to  social  and  intellectual  beings  —  to  wit: 
the  struggle  for  value-producing  power. 

Adam  Smith's  idea,  that  free  competition  for 
profits  must  result  in  the  maximum  of  public- 
serving,  is  true  for  an  imaginary  society  in  which 
there  are  no  partnerships  and  no  industrial  com- 
binations. So  long  as  men  come  to  market  as 
dissociated  individuals,  each  with  his  handiwork  in 

134 


UNIVERSITY  —  MISTRESS   OF   MARKET 

his  hands,  competition  for  profits  and  competition 
for  a  chance  to  serve  society  may  indeed  be  practi- 
cally identical.  But  such  conditions  never  really 
existed  on  any  considerable  scale,  and  the  theory 
becomes  more  and  more  unworkable  with  the 
growth  of  high  industrial  organization.  Instead 
of  competing  for  opportunity  to  serve  society,  to 
raise  general  wages  and  lower  prices,  the  competi- 
tion comes  more  and  more  to  be  a  rivalry  for  op- 
portunity to  lower  the  incomes  of  the  people  and 
increase  the  prices  that  they  must  pay.  And  this 
power  to  lower  wages  and  raise  prices  is  a  true 
definition  of  monopoly.  Free  competition  in  the 
market  is  a  theory  of  closet-philosophy.  Free  pro- 
ductive competition  is  possible,  is  necessary  to  so- 
cial health  and  progress;  but  it  cannot  be  had  in 
any  place  where  there  is  lawless  bargaining.  The 
way  to  have  freer  productive  competition  is 
through  the  legal  restriction  and  regulation  of 
commercial  competition.  The  public  must  corner 
its  own  market. 

It  is  impossible  for  the  public  to  corner  its  o~wn 
market  until  it  evolves  a  public  intellect,  an  intel- 
ligence that  works  steadily  in  the  interest  of  the 
public.  And  this  is  our  pressing  task.  In  a  million 
egotists  and  money-makers  there  may  not  be  a 
single  gleam  of  public  intelligence.  A  public  mind 
cannot  be  got  by  balancing  the  pull  and  haul  of  a 

135 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


multitude  of  self-wrapt  private  minds.  The  intelli- 
gence that  is  available  for  public  uses  belongs  only 
to  those  who  are  intent  not  upon  money-making, 
the  raising  of  their  commercial  credit,  but  upon 
the  production  of  real  values.  It  belongs  to  those 
who  get  their  joy  in  their  work,  to  good  craftsmen 
and  engineers,  to  artists,  and  men  of  science.  The 
mission  of  the  university  is  to  create  a  public  in- 
telligence capable  of  assessing  the  relative  value 
of  things  and  of  making  good  bargains  for  the 
public. 

We  may  have  our  choice  between  free  industry 
and  free  trade;  we  cannot  have  both.  If  ex- 
changes are  unregulated,  industry  will  be  enslaved. 
If  industry  is  to  be  emancipated,  trade  must  be 
put  under  legal  bonds.  We  must  choose  between 
the  freedom  of  the  trader  and  that  of  the  work- 
man. If  under  the  law  the  trader  is  left  to  drive 
as  hard  a  bargain  as  he  can,  he  will  drive  the 
masses  of  the  people  to  the  wall.  Five  thousand 
years  of  recorded  experience  prove  it.  And  thus 
the  whole  social  energy  will  be  turned  from  a 
wholesome  rivalry  for  efficiency  to  a  degrading 
competition  for  privilege. 

The  gist  of  privilege  is  the  power  to  fix  the 
price  of  one's  own  services  —  the  power  of  arbi- 
trary taxation.  And  so  long  as  the  public  gives 
over  its  right  to  fix  prices,  this  right  must  continue 

136 


UNIVERSITY MISTRESS    OF   MARKET 

to  be  the  capital  prize  of  egotistic  ambition.  For 
the  power  to  fix  prices  is  the  substance  of  sover- 
eignty —  whether  the  sovereign  reigns  or  only 
rules,  whether  he  sits  in  purple  upon  the  throne  or 
only  holds  in  pawn  the  crown  and  sceptre.  Taxa- 
tion is  the  legal  raising  of  prices;  it  is  arbitrary 
and  tyrannous  if  done  for  any  other  reason  than 
one  only — namely,  to  improve  the  general  stan- 
dard of  living.  Whether  arbitrary  and  tyrannous 
taxes  be  levied  by  spendthrift  princes  and  govern- 
ors, or  by  Napoleons  of  finance  who  have  learned 
how  to  make  princes  and  governors  their  bailiffs 
for  the  enforcement  of  the  bad  bargains  of  the 
poor  —  is  an  indifferent  matter  to  those  who 
pay. 

Business  may  look  to  either  of  two  ends;  it  may 
engross  itself  in  the  technological  processes  that 
tend  to  the  production  of  substantial  values,  or  in 
the  financial  machinations  and  advertising  devices 
that  look  toward  the  control  of  the  market.  Con- 
temporary business  in  America,  generally  speaking, 
subordinates  the  former  end  to  the  latter.  It  will 
continue  to  do  so,  will  be  obliged  to  do  so,  in  spite 
of  the  stifled  good  intentions  of  the  mass  of  busi- 
ness men,  so  long  as  American  markets  are  law- 
less. Men  of  business  are  driven  against  their 
will  to  fight  each  other  for  the  control  of  the 
market.  Every  man  strives  to  grasp  the  reins  of 

137 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


the  price-making  and  public-taxing  power  —  in 
order  that  he  may  not  himself  be  taxed  out  of 
existence  by  his  rivals. 

The  beneficent  revolution  now  in  process  —  the 
"  enabling  "  acts  conceding  to  cities  the  power  to 
make  the  rates  of  public-service  corporations,  the 
anti-rebate  and  railroad  rate-fixing  principle  —  has 
vast  involutions  that  must  soon  be  unfolded.  The 
revolution  has  begun  and  will  go  on.  There  is  no 
stopping-place  short  of  the  repudiation  of  the  most 
consecrated  political  and  economic  superstitions  of 
our  fathers.  The  obvious  end  of  it  all  is  the  rise, 
in  every  American  city,  of  a  public  intellect  domi- 
nating the  market-place. 

There  is  no  mystery  about  the  cause  of  the  life 
and  death  of  nations ;  they  flourish  as  long  as  the 
public  mind  is  strong  enough  to  hold  intellectual 
egotism  in  check,  and  they  disintegrate  and  perish 
in  the  discordant  rivalry  of  private  wills.  This 
discord  begins  by  rending  all  the  social  tissues,  but 
it  ends  in  the  enfeeblement  of  all  private  minds. 
It  does  not  produce  an  elite  of  "  super-men  "  as 
has  been  fondly  imagined.  And  the  reason  for 
the  intellectual  decadence  of  egotists  lies  in  the  fact 
that  intellect  is,  in  its  very  nature,  expansive,  public, 
and  impersonal.  By  the  laws  of  life  all  the  gains 
and  honors  of  advancing  knowledge  are  public 
property.  Nature  will  have  it  so;  and  will  take 

138 


UNIVERSITY MISTRESS    OF   MARKET 

vengeance  if  it  be  not  so.  Any  class  that  takes 
advantage  of  its  superior  knowledge  to  out-bargain 
the  unlearned  and  ignorant  is  sure  to  become  an 
intellectually  decadent  class  —  losing  its  grip  upon 
reality  and  the  elemental  world. 

Unregulated  competition  in  bargain-making  — 
i.  e.,  in  the  exchange  of  personal  services  and  com- 
modities —  must  always  drive  the  mass  of  a  popu- 
lation to  a  condition  of  indigence;  and  must,  on 
the  other  hand,  produce  a  privileged  class  stand- 
ing in  abnormal  relations  to  nature.  This  will 
happen,  no  matter  how  high  the  general  average 
of  book-learning  may  be  raised;  for  the  point  is 
the  relative  intellectual  weakness  of  some  as  com- 
pared with  others.  The  consequence  of  free  bar- 
gaining must  always  be  the  widening  of  a  gulf 
between  the  rich  and  poor.  And  the  process  will 
lead  to  general  intellectual  decadence.  For  intel- 
lectual power  in  its  last  analysis  is  simply  the  ability 
to  make  a  sound  estimate  of  the  relative  value 
of  things.  And  this  power  must  wane  in  a  state 
divided  between  the  rich  and  poor.  The  poor  can- 
not have  a  nice  sense  of  relative  values,  cannot 
see  life  in  wide  perspective,  since  their  minds  are 
dominated  by  a  need  that  admits  of  no  relativity, 
no  shading,  but  is  bald  and  absolute.  And,  on 
the  other  hand,  those  who  are  cushioned  and 
walled  in  from  contact  with  natural  law,  who  pay 

139 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


for  what  they  get,  not  with  love  or  hate,  neither 
with  laughter  nor  labor,  nor  any  other  personal 
force,  but  only  with  checks  drawn  upon  banks  — 
these  cannot  possibly  see  things  in  their  true 
proportions.  Thus  necessity  and  luxury  are  alike 
debilitating  to  intellect;  and  mental  paralysis  and 
racial  degeneracy  must  fall  upon  a  people  whose 
daily  exchanges  of  commodities  and  personal 
services  are  conducted  on  the  commercial  princi- 
ples of  our  tradition. 

'he  principles  of  lawless  commerce  are  fraud 
and  duress.  Fraud  is  the  private  use  or  conceal- 
ment of  superior  knowledge;  and  this  unhappily 
has  been,  for  long,  the  settled  custom  of  com- 
merce. A  bargain  is  an  offence  to  the  intellect 
when  the  profit  of  it  is  shared  unequally  because 
of  the  pressing  need  of  one  of  the  parties.  Yes, 
a  bargain  made  in  a  lawless  market  between  a 
hungry  man  and  one  who  is  well  fed,  is  the  perfect 
type  of  uncivilization. 

There  might  be  an  infinite  gradation  of  wealth- 
iness,  but  there  would  be  no  poverty  if  there  were 
no  fraud.  It  is  evident  from  a  comparison  of  the 
natural  powers  of  poor  men  with  those  of  beasts 
and  birds  that  squalor  and  rags  are  not  in  the 
ground-plan  of  nature.  The  poor  are  made  poor 
by  fraud;  and  they  are  kept  so  by  duress  —  by 
the  fact  that  the  terms  of  their  bargains  with 

140 


UNIVERSITY MISTRESS    OF   MARKET 

prosperous  people  are  dictated  not  by  reason,  but 
by  necessity. 

When  riches  and  poverty  become  fixed  institu- 
tions, progress  stops.  In  a  society  thus  defini- 
tively afflicted  there  can  be  no  improvement  of 
the  human  type.  The  individual  consciousness 
ceases  to  expand  and  begins  to  contract.  Life 
grows  paler  and  thinner.  The  sensibilities  are 
dulled.  There  is  a  gradual  enfeeblement  of  the 
sense  of  personal  existence.  In  the  midst  of  a 
feverish  development  of  aestheticism,  athleticism, 
and  the  complication  of  machinery  —  the  arts  and 
sciences  decline. 

To  those  who  have  an  inkling  of  these  self- 
executing  laws,  faith  in  the  ultimate  and  perma- 
nent triumph  of  the  Public  Mind  over  the  egotist, 
does  not  need  the  support  of  miracles  or  the  de- 
votion of  saints.  Such  a  one  perceives  that  he  is 
not  called  upon  to  macerate  himself,  that  there 
is  no  contradiction  between  his  own  real  interest 
and  that  of  the  public.  And  he  understands  that 
when  he  is  asked  to  help  establish  the  authority 
of  the  Public  Mind  over  the  wide  field  of  ex- 
changes, he  is  invited  to  get  up  and  fight  for  his 
own  life.  He  knows  that  he  will  be  pinched  and 
shrivelled  if  he  does  not  get  up;  that,  rich  or 
poor,  his  life  will  wither  within  him. 


141 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


XIV 
SUMMARY 

NO  man  that  talks  in  platitudes  —  saying 
what  everybody  admits  to  be  so  —  can 
make  any  real  contribution  to  the  new  order.  And 
nobody  who  takes  action  merely  to  "  enforce  the 
law  "  as  it  stands  can  be  regarded  as  a  man  of 
the  modern  spirit.  There  is  need  of  a  new  ethic. 
What  was  once  regarded  as  a  "  square  deal "  has 
become  treason  and  felony.  The  new  ethical  prin- 
ciple, working  its  way  into  people's  minds  in  spite 
of  the  lack  of  literary  expression,  is  that  business 
must  first  of  all  do  good,  the  profits  must  be  sec- 
ondary and  contingent.  This  idea  is  of  course 
strictly  revolutionary.  Honesty  in  the  past  has 
meant  not  meaning  to  steal;  in  the  future  it  will 
mean  the  determination  to  produce  real  values. 
As  the  source  of  all  our  social  misery  is  the 
unequal  bargain  made  between  men  of  unequal 
wits,  so  the  regeneration  is  to  be  found  in  the  rise 
of  a  political  association  that  shall  stand  for  the 
public  supervision  of  bargains,  the  setting  forth 

142 


SUMMARY 


of  all  exchanges  on  grounds  that  lie  open  to  the 
day.  The  spirit  of  our  traditionary  law  conse- 
crates all  private  bargains  and  enforces  all.  Its 
fatuity  consists  in  the  fact  that  it  consecrates  and 
enforces  fatuity,  the  bad  bargains  of  the  witless. 
Thus  to  the  aristocracy  of  breeding  has  succeeded 
an  oligarchy  of  chicane  —  a  polity  that  has  con- 
tented itself  with  giving  to  every  man  a  des- 
perate fighting-chance  of  being  smarter  than  his 
neighbors. 

Why  do  the  arts  fail  —  the  finer  arts  that 
minister  to  the  mind  and  the  coarser  arts  that 
feed,  clothe,  and  house  the  people?  Because  the 
university  hitherto  has  lived  in  a  cloister.  There 
is  no  power  in  mere  stores  of  information  heaped 
in  libraries  —  or  in  heads.  The  truth  must  fight 
for  its  footing.  Those  who  contend  for  the  arts 
and  sciences  must  not  rest  content  in  a  city  that  is 
dominated  by  the  military  or  the  money  power, 
by  the  superstitions  of  clergymen  or  the  fictions  of 
lawyers.  Does  this  mean  that  the  scholar  shall 
go  into  politics?  No;  that  the  university  shall. 
The  university  becomes  the  party  of  the  arts  and 
sciences  —  striving  openly  to  get  the  police  power 
into  the  hands  of  the  masters  of  materials.  The 
university  is  not  a  close  corporation  of  intellectual 
people.  Intellect  and  exclusiveness  are  contra- 
dictory terms.  The  university  is  by  its  very 

143 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


nature  democratic  —  a  communism  of  intellect. 
It  makes  all  truth  public  property.  It  hates  the 
caste  of  culture. 

It  is  impossible  for  the  university  to  escape  from 
the  obscurant  rule  of  a  privileged  class,  other- 
wise than  by  making  itself  a  power  in  politics.  It 
must  stoop  to  conquer.  It  must  become  the 
champion  of  the  ignorant  before  it  can  become 
itself. 

The  university  in  humbling  itself  will  be  ex- 
alted. In  offering  its  services  to  the  poor  and  ig- 
norant the  power  of  the  majority  will  pass  into  it. 
It  will  become  the  seat  of  popular  government. 
The  people  will  accept  its  services;  they  cannot 
help  it.  And  they  will  acknowledge  its  authority; 
because  it  is  irresistible. 

The  two  final  forms  of  order  are :  ( i )  the  rule 
of  the  taxing  power  and  (2)  the  rule  of  the  power 
to  create  goods.  The  world  has  been  governed 
for  a  long  time  by  those  who,  one  way  or  another, 
have  had  power  to  tax  people,  to  make  their 
bread  dear;  now,  after  a  little,  the  world-sceptre 
will  pass  to  those  who  can  cheapen  the  necessaries 
of  life.  For  the  power  to  serve  the  people  is  ex- 
actly as  compulsive  as  the  power  to  tax  them.  Men 
are  by  the  very  law  of  their  nature  obliged  to 
follow  the  lead  of  their  saviors. 

It  is  impossible  for  men  in  mass  to  refuse  a 
144 


SUMMARY 


real  and  recognized  improvement.  Hence  it  is 
not  a  figure  of  speech  to  talk  of  the  "  rule  "  of 
the  efficient.  Those  who  can  bless  the  race  are 
as  imperious  as  those  who  can  blight  it  —  and 
their  authority  is  equally  irresistible.  Their  ad- 
ministration will  be  not  less,  but  more  energetic. 
Tolstoi  was  wrong  in  supposing  that  a  society 
freed  from  privilege  and  oppression  would  have 
no  use  for  force.  The  fact  is  that  a  greater  social 
energy  and  momentum  can  be  induced  by  hope 
than  by  fear.  Woe  to  those  who  stubbornly  op- 
pose a  people  that  is  mobilized  for  progress ! 

The  waste  of  "  the  system,"  the  financial 
regime  under  which  we  live,  is  not  summed  up 
merely  in  the  diverting  of  immense  quantities  of 
created  wealth,  through  the  channels  of  interest 
and  profit,  to  the  maintenance  of  an  enervating 
luxury.  The  chief  waste  is  of  the  wealth  that  is 
not  produced,  for  lack  of  capital.  For  the  crown- 
ing vice  of  "  capitalism  "  is  that  it  destroys  capital; 
it  condemns  the  majority  to  dull  routine  through 
lack  of  the  tools  necessary  to  more  interesting 
enterprises. 

In  a  perfectly  healthy  society  all  wealth  would 
be  capital ;  i.  e.y  nothing  would  be  produced  save 
the  kind  of  things  that  were  conducive  to  the 
further  production  of  good  things.  But  the  in- 
terest and  aim  of  capitalism  is  to  restrict  the 

145 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


amount  of  reproductive  goods  —  live  wealth  or 
capital,  and  to  increase  the  amount  of  dead  wealth 
or  luxury. 

The  free  play  of  "  the  system  "  tends  toward 
the  lowering  of  the  interest  rate  —  a  fact  which 
has  not  been  sufficiently  considered  by  either  the 
socialists  or  the  orthodox  economists.  This 
means  the  lessening  of  the  demand  for  tools,  and 
the  basing  of  the  power  of  the  great  "  captains  of 
industry "  upon  the  sheer  hold  of  the  creditor 
over  the  debtor.  Society  as  a  whole  falls  into  a 
state  of  peonage  and  is  obliged  to  serve  its  masters 
because  it  cannot  pay  its  debts.  What  is  called  by 
the  socialists  Capitalism  is  therefore  not  really  the 
rule  of  the  capitalist  as  such,  but  the  rule  of  the 
creditor.  It  should  rather  be  called  Creditism  — 
or  Padronism.  The  development  of  this  padron- 
ism has  already  brought  to  pass  that  the  mere  in- 
vestor—  i.  e.,  the  capitalist  —  is  continually  and 
systematically  sacrificed  to  the  interest  of  the 
great  franchise-holders  and  trust  managers.  The 
tendency  is  toward  a  state  of  affairs  in  which  capi- 
tal as  such  will  have  no  power  at  all;  nobody  will 
be  able  to  get  an  income  by  lending  tools.  The 
great  creditors  will  have  the  use  and  control  of  all 
available  tools  on  their  own  terms  —  even  with- 
out interest  —  simply  in  virtue  of  their  repressive 
power  as  creditors,  their  power  to  foreclose  upon 


SUMMARY 


society  and  stop  the  'vital  processes,  unless  their 
terms  are  acceded  to. 

The  amazing  demand  for  Panama  bonds  illus- 
trates the  foregoing  principle  that  mere  capitalism 
or  interest-taking  is  not  the  real  coign  of  vantage 
in  the  control  of  our  industrial  order.  Such  se- 
curities may  some  day  be  sold  altogether  without 
interest,  to  corporation-managers  intent  upon  per- 
fecting their  estate  as  public  creditors.  The  point 
is  that  the  preoccupation  of  our  traditionary  law 
is  in  the  collection  of  private  debts  —  to  the  neg- 
lect of  the  real  aim  of  civilization,  which  is  the 
keeping  of  society  out  of  debt.  Society  itself 
should  be  the  predominant  creditor. 

Every  government  in  Europe  and  America  — 
in  the  whole  circle  of  commerce  —  is  virtually 
bankrupt,  since  it  is  being  administered  for  the 
benefit  of  its  creditors.  The  officers  of  state  con- 
stitute a  receivership  charged  with  the  liquidation 
of  the  social  obligation  —  with  a  general  disre- 
gard for  the  fortunes  of  the  debtor  class. 

Socialism  proceeds  upon  a  false  diagnosis,  and 
so  can  offer  no  availing  remedy  for  this  state  of 
affairs.  Its  proposed  collective  ownership  of  tools 
would  not  touch  the  root  of  the  disease  —  which 
is  social  insolvency  through  the  failure  of  society 
to  husband  its  own  assets.  It  would  be  easy 
under  a  socialist  system  for  a  'party t  a  class,  to 

147 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


control,  and  so  in  effect  to  "  own  "  —  the  tools  of 
production.  This  would  be  done  by  the  methods  of 
patronage  that  parties  use  to-day.  The  motive- 
force  of  socialism  is  the  promotion  of  the  major- 
ity —  the  false  principle  that  begets  party-rule. 
Socialism  evinces  no  perception  of  the  principle 
that  is  really  capable  of  getting  the  public  out  of 
debt  —  which  is  not  the  rule  of  the  majority,  but 
the  rule  of  the  capable. 

The  social  struggle  upon  which  we  are  entering 
is  tripartite.  Two  of  the  parties  to  the  great  con- 
troversy are  already  very  much  in  evidence;  they 
seem  indeed  to  cover  the  whole  field.  The  late 
Senator  Hanna  had  only  these  two  in  view 
when  he  said  that  the  issue  of  the  near  future  lay 
between  Imperialism  and  Socialism.  Mr.  Hanna 
did  not  perceive  —  he  was  perhaps  so  constituted 
that  he  could  not  perceive  —  that  the  issue  between 
imperialism,  and  socialism,  between  plutocracy  and 
proletarianism,  between  "  the  communism  of 
capital  "  and  that  of  "  labor  "  —  is  superficial 
and  illusory.  It  affects  only  private  fortunes  — 
determines  the  personnel  of  privilege.  Bonaparte 
or  Robespierre? 

From  the  point  of  view  of  those  who  look  for 
news,  this  immemorial  controversy  is  a  dreadful 
and  futile  sham  battle,  a  bloody  game  of  broken 
heads  and  hearts.  Organized  capital  and  organ- 

148 


SUMMARY 


ized  labor  are  both  obscurant  and  reactionary. 
Each  necessitates  the  other,  to  be  sure;  yet  life 
would  be  unlivable  if  either  of  them  could  finally 
and  utterly  succeed,  which  happily  is  impossible. 
They  can  only  turn  and  return,  with  endless  boule- 
versements,  like  those  marionette  wrestlers  with 
hands  riveted  together  that  hawkers  sell  in  the 
street. 

The  third  party  in  the  struggle  is  of  course  that 
company  of  sensible  men  whose  interest  in  beauty 
and  reality  is  stronger  than  their  "  class  conscious- 
ness. "  But  these  will  inevitably  be  drawn  into 
the  class  struggle,  one  by  one,  until  none  are  left 
to  speak  for  humanity  and  the  arts  —  unless  now, 
while  there  is  yet  time,  they  form  their  Mace- 
donian phalanx,  their  "  flying  wedge." 


149 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


ADDENDA 

PUBLISHER'S   NOTE 

The  articles  following  —  mostly  from  the  hand  of  the  author  —  are 
excerpts  from  the  Newsbook,  a  thick  duodecimo  volume  projected  as  a 
quarterly  magazine  and  published  by  the  Municipal  University  of 
Kansas  City,  Missouri. 

They  are  reprinted  here  for  the  light  they  shed  on  the  practical  work" 
ings  of  an  institution  engendered  in  the  spirit  of  this  book. 

They  should  help  to  convince  the  reader  that  the  author's  protest 
against  the  academic  conception  of  the  University,  is  not  itself  merely 
academic,  but  is  on  the  contrary  capable  of  being  translated  into  an 
effective  and  regenerative  political  power. 

FOR   THE   WHOLE    OF   KANSAS 
CITY  — EAST   AND  WEST 

MEN  are  usually  true  to  those  who  really 
trust  them.  Even  the  boss  is  boss  because 
he  keeps  faith  with  the  special  interest  that  de- 
pends upon  him.  Make  him  the  trusted  agent 
of  the  general  interest  and,  ten  to  one,  he  will 
be  true  to  that.  Anyhow,  there  are  a  dozen  men 
in  every  block  who  will. 

Give  us  city  government  "  by  commission,"  with 
ample  powers  to  the  commissioners  and  distinct 

150 


ADDENDA 


responsibility.  The  corruption  of  the  cities  is 
due  to  the  legal  complication  of  checks  and  bal- 
ances, the  net-work  of  systematic  suspicion. 

Our  intricate  scheme  of  city  government  is 
mediaeval.  It  cannot  mobilize  the  creative  forces. 
It  is  framed  to  balance  the  egotisms  of  rival 
classes,  but  is  utterly  unfit  for  a  generous  people 
bent  upon  an  enterprise  in  common  —  the  subdual 
of  the  earth  and  the  raising  of  the  standard  of 
life. 

For  the  whole  of  Kansas  City  —  East  and 
West! 

Let  us  have  government  by  commission  on  both 
sides  of  the  State  line.  And  then  let  the  two 
groups  of  commissioners  form  a  "  gentlemen's 
agreement  "  —  a  Public  Trust —  for  the  compre- 
hensive administration  of  the  whole  municipal 
district.  The  merger  of  public  corporations  is  the 
best  defense  against  the  merger  of  private  ones. 

Not  now,  but  pretty  soon  —  when  Kansas  City 
shall  have  a  million  —  its  metropolitan  district 
should  include  Jackson,  Clay,  and  Platte  counties 
in  Missouri,  and  Wyandotte  and  Johnson  in 
Kansas  —  or  say,  all  the  land  within  a  radius  of 
twenty-five  miles  from  the  mouth  of  the  Kaw. 
For  a  city  that  cannot  support  its  own  population 
is  sociologically  parasitic.  It  cannot  escape  from 
slums,  swelldom,  and  the  other  deadly  symptoms. 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


THE   NEWSBOOK 

A  PERIODICAL  should  be,  after  a  fashion  and 
however  humbly,  a  work  of  art;  and  it  is  the 
nature  of  a  work  of  art  that  it  sets  up  its  own 
standard  and  is  not  to  be  judged  by  anything 
outside.  It  is  good  if  it  tastes  good. 

You  see  at  a  glance  that  this  publication  does  not 
conform  to  the  common  prepossession  as  to  what 
a  magazine  ought  to  be.  It  is  not  like  the  solemn 
reviews  —  not  to  be  compared,  even  at  a  great  dis- 
tance, with  the  North  American  or  the  ancient 
oracle  of  Edinburgh.  And  it  is  as  far  removed 
from  Scribner's  and  Munsey's  and  all  the  other 
pleasant  dispensers  of  mental  lunches  and  literary 
vaudeville. 

This  book,  in  its  body,  is  what  it  is  because  we 
are  not  able  to  find  any  better  form,  just  now,  to 
express  its  meaning.  It  exists  to  give  feature  to 
an  authority  that  is  rising  up  out  of  the  very 
ground  and  that  will  not  be  silenced  —  or  even 
any  longer  muffled.  This  is  the  age  —  and  this 
Western  land  is  especially  the  place  —  that  be- 
longs by  right  to  the  spirit  of  the  university  and  to 
the  Masters  of  Materials.  The  Masters  of  the 
Sword  and  the  Masters  of  the  Purse  have  had 
their  day.  They  are  a  race  of  faineant  Merovin- 

152 


ADDENDA 


gian  kings  who  must  now  give  place  to  the  hardier 
stock  of  this  new  Charlemagne. 

•  •••         •         ••        •        • 

It  is  curious  how  the  traders  in  printed  stuffs, 
ever  so  attentive  to  the  market-demands  and  eager 
to  set  out  a  new  pattern  in  poems  or  prose  if  there 
is  anywhere  a  whistle  for  it,  curious  that  they 
should  have  put  every  kind  of  a  thing  upon  their 
book-stalls  and  news-stands  except  the  thing  that 
is  most  wanted. 

What  the  people  want  is  a  higher  standard  of 
living  and  a  public  organ  to  articulate  that  de- 
mand. They  want  the  necessaries  of  life  to  be 
cheaper,  and  the  graces  more  attainable.  What 
they  get  from  the  teeming  presses  is  an  infinite 
outpour  of  anodynes,  a  million  inducements  to 
spend  their  time  and  money,  and  to  relax  and 
scatter  their  wills.  Tms  is  curious  and  remark- 
able, but  it  is  not  mysterious.  Certainly  not.  It 
is  of  a  piece  with  a  thousand  other  anomalies  of 
our  impracticable  commercialism. 

•  •••         •         ••         •         • 

The  remark  usually  passes  without  criticism  that 
the  Press  is  a  great  power.  It  was  once  called  the 
Fourth  Estate;  but  no  one  would  describe  it  in 
that  way  to-day  —  it  is  now  rather  supposed  to  be 
the  First.  Yet  the  simple  truth  is  that  the  Press  as 

153 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


we  actually  know  it  is  a  convenience  —  an  indis- 
pensable convenience.  It  is  a  great  power  in  about 
the  same  sense  that  the  Laundry  is  —  or  the 
Market  Garden.  Certainly  it  is  a  prodigy  of 
moral  and  intellectual  passivity  —  a  spineless 
cactus,  framed  for  the  ruminants.  It  has  its  way 
with  us  not  by  leading  us,  but  by  following  us  — 
and  waylaying  us  in  dark  places. 

It  is  unintelligent  to  blame  the  individual  news- 
paper man  for  this  state  of  affairs.  It  is  with 
journalism  as  it  is  with  the  Army  or  the  Church; 
the  huge  system  moves  with  irresistible  fatality, 
carrying  the  individual  along,  or  driving  over  him 
if  he  misses  the  step.  And  the  newspaper  business 
has  had  its  full  share  of  martyrs.  But  it  is  not 
unreasonable  to  conceive,  in  this  changing  world, 
that  the  whole  existing  system  of  news-mongering 
may,  by  orderly  processes  and  in  due  time,  be 
superseded  by  a  better. 


There  are  indeed  sound  reasons  for  believing 
that  the  newspaper  is  destined  to  stand,  by  and 
by,  in  the  very  focus  of  social  force.  Genuine  de- 
mocracy is  the  enthronement  of  the  artistic-scien- 
tific intellect.  And  under  modern  conditions  the 
characteristic  organ  of  the  intellect  is  not  a  book 
or  a  library,  but  a  newspaper.  For  it  is  the  very 

154 


ADDENDA 


essence  of  modernity  that  the  intellect  is  ceasing 
to  be  dogmatic,  and  is  learning  to  take  things  on 
the  fly,  to  shoot  without  a  rest. 

The  intellect  of  the  Old  World  never  ventured 
out  of  doors  without  a  smooth-wrapped  generali- 
zation tucked  umbrella-wise  under  its  arm;  but 
the  modern  intellect  thrives  in  the  wind  and  rain, 
and  swims  strongest  in  the  swiftest  stream  of 
change.  So  then  if  journalism  is  the  intellectual 
mastery  of  current  events,  it  must  have  the  su- 
preme seat  of  authority  in  that  kingdom  which  is 
at  hand.  In  the  social  order  dominated  by  the 
working  intellect,  the  newspaper  will  be  the 
government. 

Conversely  it  is  true  that  the  most  effective  way 
of  hastening  the  new  day  and  the  "  new  deal  "  is 
to  move  for  the  evolution  of  the  new  and  authen- 
tic kind  of  journal.  The  NEWSBOOK  presents  it- 
self as  a  fairly  well  nucleated  germ-cell,  or,  say, 
a  knot  of  the  most  rudimentary  organic  filaments, 
that  by  careful  nursing  may  grow  into  a  true  type 
of  democratic  journalism.  It  claims  consideration 
and  criticism,  not  for  its  bulk,  nor  yet  for  its 
quality,  but  solely  for  its  kind.  It  is  a  new  species. 


The  idea  of  a  counting-room  newspaper  —  the 
moral  and  intellectual  topsy-turvydom  of  a  con- 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


cern  that  gravely  makes  law  and  politics  to  meas- 
ure, that  offers  ethical  sentiments  and  sanitary 
science  to  fit  the  lean  or  fit  the  fat  —  this,  cer- 
tainly, when  it  ceases  to  be  a  serious  fact,  will  be- 
come a  humorous  fancy,  a  tale  of  Troll-land  de- 
lightful to  the  children  of  another  day.  That  a 
working  sociologist,  a  professional  publicist  — 
and  that  is  what  a  newspaper  man  really  pretends 
to  be  —  that  such  a  character  should  be  engaged  in 
writing  up  or  writing  down  particular  classes 
and  special  interests  will,  some  day,  seem  as  gro- 
tesque as  that  Bruno  should  fix  his  astronomical 
science  to  suit  the  Pope  or  that  a  modern  biolo- 
gist should  take  a  retainer  from  the  Methodist 
Church. 

The  NEWSBOOK  is  an  attempt,  on  the  smallest 
tangible  scale,  to  embody  the  following  ideas: 

I.  Journalism  —  meaning  the  intellectual  com- 
prehension of  passing  events  —  is  going  to  be  the 
dominant  force  of  a  genuine  democracy,  virtually 
the  sovereign  power. 

II.  It  is  absurd  that  a  newspaper  of  this  new 
kind  should  be  owned  by  a  commercial  corporation 
or  managed  for  profit.    It  must  be  owned  and  con- 
trolled by  an  association  created  in  the  spirit  that 
exults  in  artistic  and  scientific  achievement.     It  is 
a  mistake  to  suppose  that  this  requires  an  evolu- 
tion of  human  nature  and  the  production  of  a  bet- 


ADDENDA 


ter  kind  of  men  than  those  that  are  all  about  us. 
It  requires  merely  a  new  social  combination. 

III.  As  the  university  spirit,  penetrating  the 
heart  of  the  cities,  is  the  soul  of  the  new  social 
movement,  so  the  artistic-scientific  newspaper  is 
the  body  of  that  soul.  To  read  the  same  print, 
and  to  have  some  kind  of  a  part  in  bringing  it 
into  being  —  that  is  the  intimate,  modern  bond  of 
communion  between  men  of  one  mind.  What 
rituals  were  once,  the  saying  of  the  same  prayers 
and  singing  of  the  same  hymns;  what  oratory 
was,  and  the  physical  contact  of  dense-packed 
political  meetings  —  that  the  daily  and  periodical 
press  has  now  become.  And  more  and  more,  with 
the  modern  distaste  for  committing  oneself  to 
creeds  and  platforms  —  to  any  and  every  possible 
statement  of  abstract  principles  —  men  in  whom 
this  modern  spirit  is  strong  are  brought  to  a  pass 
where  they  can  only  say  to  one  another:  Let  us 
take  a  brief  for  persecuted  Nature ;  we  will  be  hot 
partisans  of  science,  and  close-knit  gangsters  for 
the  human  race.  Parties  and  sects  fade.  The 
most  representative  men  can  unite  upon  nothing 
save  a  common  love  for  what  is  real. 

In  this  emergency  the  university  idea  offers  it- 
self as  the  only  ground  for  the  effective  correlation 
of  wills.  And  the  newspaper  —  the  most  subtile, 
versatile,  and  spiritual  invention  of  the  ages  —  be- 

157 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


comes  the  adequate  organ  for  their  expression.  Its 
union  is  not  of  the  letter,  but  of  the  spirit.  Thus 
some  members  of  the  Municipal  University  may 
not  agree  with  all  that  is  said  in  this  issue  of  the 
NEWSBOOK;  very  well,  they  can  unite  to  produce 
fresh  issues  that  shall  be  more  reasonable. 

IV.  The  effective  organization  of  that  voiceless 
middle  American  public  which  stands  hesitating 
to-day  between  the  Machiavellian  "  System  "  and 
the  Deep  Sea  of  Socialism  requires  the  establish- 
ing of  this  new  kind  of  newspaper  in  every  city 
and  town  —  a  monthly  or  weekly  newsbook,  ar- 
tistic, scientific,  and  cheap,  backed  everywhere  by 
a  civic  university.    The  solution  of  our  social  and 
political  problem  lies  in  sheer  bald  truth-speaking 
—  in  the  spirit  of  art  and  science.    All  we  need  is 
light  and  air,  floods  of  both,  in  the  dark  places. 
Every  other  device  will  fail.     If  we  neglect  this 
now,  we  shall  return  to  it.     The  social  problem 
narrows  down  to  this  point:    How  can  we  get 
an  artistic-scientific  newspaper,  a  perfectly  healthy 
organ  of  publicity  —  a  newspaper  so  made  that  it 
thrives  in  the  sunlight  and  the  open  air,  and  can- 
not thrive  otherwise  ?    That  is  the  question.    The 
answer  has  been  indicated  above. 

V.  It  is  a  matter  of  simple  psychology  to  prove 
that  a  newspaper  conducted  by  the  managers  of  a 
corporation  for  the  financial  profit  of  its  stock- 


ADDENDA 


holders  cannot  possibly  steer  clear  of  "graft"; 
the  suction  is  all  in  that  direction.  The  managers 
may  be  scrupulous;  if  so,  their  conscientiousness 
will  keep  them  from  sacrificing  to  the  public  the 
private  interests  of  their  employers.  Besides,  it  is 
not  enough  that  a  newspaper  should  try  not  to  do 
wrong;  such  a  disposition  has  no  salvation  in  it. 
What  is  wanted  is  a  publication  that  is  keen  for 
discovery  and  revelation,  alive  with  the  delight  of 
finding  new  ways  of  doing  right.  The  kind  of  a 
newspaper  corporation  we  need  is  one  that  has  no 
more  thought  of  dividends  than  a  church  has,  or  a 
college,  or  an  art  institute. 

It  is  not  a  question  of  personalities.  The  old- 
line  newspaper  men  would,  of  course,  do  better 
work  under  the  new  arrangements  than  could  up- 
start idealists  and  puritans. 

VI.  How  to  get  the  driving-force  for  this  en- 
terprise ?    Throw  on  to  the  wire  a  portion  at  least 
of  the  immense  voltage  that  is  being  used  so  uneco- 
nomically  in  the  factitious  rivalry  between  indis- 
tinguishable religious  sects  and  political  parties. 
There  is  no  city  or  country  town  in  the  United 
States  where  a  university  of  the  people  and  an  ar- 
tistic-scientific newspaper  could  not  be  created  with 
half  the  moral  energy  that  is  being  thus  wasted. 

VII.  The  newspaper  of  the  future  will  be  more 
arrestive,  more  humanly  interesting  and  pictur- 

159 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


esque  than  anything  we  have  yet  seen.  Our  journal- 
istic swing  between  sensationalism  and  insipidity  is 
a  curable  disease.  And  we  have  not  yet  formed  a 
conception  of  the  swift  gains  we  should  make  in 
practical  matters  —  like  the  natural-gas  problem 
in  this  city,  the  planning  and  financing  of  a  union 
station,  and  so  on  —  if  we  only  had  some  way  of 
bringing  the  intellect  and  experience  of  the  world 
to  a  local  focus  at  the  right  moment,  and  in  a  man- 
ner free  from  suspicion.  Usually  we  do  not  get  the 
best  expert  testimony  on  any  subject,  but  only  the 
second  or  tenth  best.  And  the  truth  that  we  do  get 
from  the  extant  press  is  for  the  most  part  unavail- 
able, because  there  is  no  known  system  of  public 
assay  whereby  we  can  pick  out  the  truth  from  the 
mass  of  reports  that  are  not  true. 

The  tireless  mayor  of  Kansas  City  leaves  his 
office  and  journeys  from  town  to  town  to  pick  up 
scraps  of  information  about  the  terminal  problem 
—  not  that  he  claims  any  special  competency  in  the 
matter  save  singleness  of  mind.  What  a  confes- 
sion is  that  whole  business  of  our  lack  of  an  organ 
of  public  intellect! 

VIII.  This  publishing  enterprise  of  ours  may 
not  go  fast.  It  gets  up  and  goes  as  fast  as  it  can. 

At  fifty  cents,  the  book  is  of  course  too  dear  to 
have  an  extensive  circulation.  It  lies  with  the  pub- 
lic to  make  it  better  and  cheaper  —  and  put  it  into 

1 60 


ADDENDA 


every  house  in  town.  It  offers  itself  as  a  labor- 
saving  tool,  a  public  utility  with  incalculable  latent 
values.  It  claims  to  be  an  instrument  which,  if 
a  few  hundred  discerning  men  will  deign  to  use  it, 
will  save  the  city  millions  of  dollars,  obviate  many 
confusions  and  perplexities,  and  raise  the  general 
standard  of  living  in  this  place.  This  expectation 
is  based  not  upon  any  special  talent  or  virtue  in  the 
projectors,  but  wholly  upon  the  method  employed. 
The  gist  of  the  method  lies  in  the  design  to  create 
a  journalistic  concern  that  is  neither  capitalistic  nor 
eleemosynary,  that  is  conducted  neither  for  profits 
nor  for  charity.  If  it  were  capitalized  or  endowed, 
the  project  would,  in  the  ordinary  course  of  human 
nature,  become  —  what  the  run  of  publications 
are.  We  rest  our  case  on  the  personal  interest  that 
sensible  men  are  bound  to  invest  in  entirely  public 
aims. 

That  such  an  undertaking  is  unique  is  not  our 
fault;  it  is  the  fault  of  the  social  system  in  which 
we  live.  It  will  not  for  long  continue  to  be  ex- 
ceptional. All  business  corporations  will  in  due 
time  be  brought  to  serve  the  public  on  the  same 
terms.  The  winning  of  a  true  and  civilized  type 
of  journalistic  corporation  is  merely  the  strategic 
point  in  the  battle  for  the  new  order.  Win  that, 
and  the  rest  will  be  easy.  The  quintessence  of 
that  new  order  is  that  it  takes  the  initiative  and 

161 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


control  of  enterprise  away  from  the  Money  Power 
and  gives  it  to  the  Power  to  Think  Straight.  It 
is  endlessly  degrading  that  money  should  control 
the  mind  of  the  world;  civilization  requires  that 
the  mind  shall  control  the  money. 

IX.  The  present  contents  of  the  NEWSBOOK 
are  merely  germinal  —  serving  to  indicate  the  line 
of  possible  development.  The  book  does  not  grow 
out  of  the  desire  to  get  these  things  printed.  They 
are  rather  the  deciduous  leaves  upon  the  limbs 
of  an  Idea,  an  Idea  burgeoning  easily  and  inevi- 
tably without  much  insistence  from  any  man  —  and 
without  anxiety.  If  the  Idea  escapes  from  this 
book  and  leaves  our  words  to  mat  the  paths  in 
Vallombrosa,  we  have  no  doubt  that  it  will  survive 
elsewhere  —  and  will  command  the  service  of 
stronger  hands. 

THE     MUNICIPAL     UNIVERSITY 

WE  raise  a  hue  and  cry  about  the  "  reign  of  graft,'* 
the  "  shame  of  the  cities  "  and  the  "  plunderbund." 
Demagogues  of  high  and  low  degree  —  good  fel- 
lows are  sometimes  demagogues  —  tell  us  that  we, 
the  American  people,  are  an  honest  and  noble  race, 
but  that  a  few  thousand  black  sheep  have  crept 
by  night  into  our  immaculate  flock.  We  are  told 
that  the  solution  of  all  our  social  problems  con- 

162 


ADDENDA 


sists  in  separating  the  "  decent  people  "  from  those 
that  are  not  so  decent,  by  an  impassable  abatis 
of  prison-bars.  This  is  at  best  a  grave  mistake 
in  diagnosis.  The  fact  is  that  "  graft  "  is  an  epi- 
demic social  disease  —  and  not  one  of  us  is  free 
from  the  taint  of  it.  The  vile  humor  is  commer- 
cialism —  a  morbid  commercialism,  sick  for  lack 
of  any  social  standard  for  the  assessing  of  real 
values.  We  give  it  a  bad  name  and  call  it  "  graft  " 
only  when  it  rises  —  as  by  irresistible  capillarity 
it  must  rise  —  up  out  of  the  region  that  we  had 
agreed  to  call  "  private  business  "  into  that  which 
we  have  called  "  public  business."  We  have  in  the 
past  supposed  that  the  ice  men,  for  instance,  could 
plague  the  public  as  much  as  they  pleased  and  be 
held  blameless  —  if  they  found  it  profitable ;  but 
if  the  policeman  should  abate  a  little  of  their  public 
devotion  and  make  a  dollar  "  on  the  side,"  we 
have  been  thrown  into  fits  of  moral  hysteria. 

Now  this  distinction  is  not  permanently  valid. 
It  is  impossible  that  men  who  go  to  the  same 
churches  and  belong  to  the  same  clubs  should  do 
their  day's  work  on  opposite  ethical  principles.  In 
the  long  run  —  and  we  are  coming  to  the  end  of 
a  pretty  long  run  —  one  of  these  two  irreconcilable 
theories  of  what  is  right  and  decent  must  conquer 
and  hold  the  territory  of  the  other.  The  police- 
man's ethics  must  drive  the  ice-wagon,  or  the  ice 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


man's,  the  patrol  wagon.  It  has  been  possible  to 
keep  up  the  illusive  distinction  so  long  only  because 
it  has  been  supposed  that  there  was  a  clean-cut 
difference  between  public  and  private  business. 
That  idea  is  appendicitic,  a  dangerous  survival 
of  the  feudal  order  —  which  despised  trade  and 
did  not  foresee  that  business  men  might  some  day 
aspire  to  associate  with  gentlemen. 

According  to  that  old-fashioned  way  of  think- 
ing, private  business  was  contemptible  just  because 
of  its  privacy  —  its  narrow  self-interestedness.  All 
the  honorable  occupations  were  assimilated  to  the 
public  service.  The  so-called  liberal  professions 
were  well-esteemed  because  a  lawyer,  a  physician, 
a  clergyman,  a  military  officer,  a  man  of  letters  was 
supposed  to  act  not  as  a  bought  or  hired  man, 
but  as  a  free  and  self-directing  person,  a  member 
of  the  governing  class.  Or,  to  go  a  little  deeper 
into  the  mind  of  feudalism,  it  may  be  said  that  the 
gentry  were  gentlemen  because  they  were  supposed 
to  "  like  their  job,"  to  be  in  it  for  their  health, 
while  the  mechanics  and  tradespeople  worked  be- 
cause they  had  to. 

A  gentleman  "  of  the  old  school "  might  take 
money  for  his  work.  There  was  no  harm  in  that. 
Only  it  must  be  perfectly  clear  that  the  work  was 
not  done  for  the  sake  of  the  money;  that  the  mo- 
tive was  in  his  own  will.  Up  to  a  recent  date  in 

164 


ADDENDA 


England  there  was  no  form  of  legal  action  where- 
by a  lawyer  could  collect  a  fee;  the  British  bar  re- 
frained from  the  assertion  of  its  rights  in  this  re- 
gard in  order  to  emphasize  the  principle  that  a  bar- 
rister was  an  officer  of  the  court,  an  agent  of  public 
justice,  and  that  his  interest  lay  in  that  quarter, 
his  honorarium  being  incidental  and  non-essential. 
So  it  was  of  the  ethics  of  the  medical  profession 
—  inhibiting  a  physician  from  patenting  his  medi- 
cines, from  advertising  his  specialty  or  from  keep- 
ing therapeutic  secrets  from  the  fraternity.  A 
clergyman  likewise  might  indeed  be  venal  and  sor- 
did of  soul,  but  it  was  impossible  for  him  to  get 
a  parish  otherwise  than  on  the  general  assumption 
that  he  was  driven  to  his  work  not  by  the  bill- 
collector,  but  by  the  inner  voice,  that  it  was  woe 
to  him  not  to  preach.  And  so  it  was  of  the  painter 
and  the  poet,  the  lieutenant  and  the  lord  mayor. 
A  gentleman  might  plow,  hunt,  dig  in  the  trenches, 
hold  the  towel  at  a  clinic  or  wash  the  feet  of 
lepers  —  but  he  must  not  work  for  pay. 

There  is  a  democratic  soul  of  truth  in  every 
stubborn  aristocratic  prejudice.  "  The  hireling 
fleeth  because  he  is  an  hireling  and  careth  not; 
but  the  Good  Shepherd  lays  down  his  life  for  the 
sheep."  And  the  cogency  of  this  principle  loses 
nothing  by  lapse  of  time ;  the  man  that  works  be- 
cause he  wants  to  is  bound  to  have  a  better  earth- 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


grip  than  the  fellow  who  takes  hold  because  he 
wants  to  let  go.  There  is  n't  a  ghost  of  a  show 
for  the  Hired  Man,  when  once  the  Master  of 
the  House  shall  have  decided  to  make  an  issue. 

The  distinction  between  professional  and  official 
ethics  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  ethics  of  the  manu- 
facturer and  trader  on  the  other,  is  maintainable 
only  through  the  social  subordination  of  the  latter 
class.  So  long  as  the  man  of  business  was  con- 
tent to  sit  below  the  salt  and  confess  that  he  was 
not  much  of  a  gentleman,  there  was  no  moral 
absurdity  in  his  doing  his  day's  work  in  a  less 
high-spirited  way  than  the  priest  or  the  prince 
did.  But  when  the  social  centre  of  gravity  passed 
over  to  the  industrial  and  commercial  class  —  the 
Third  Estate  —  then  the  distinction  between  high- 
tempered  public  business  and  low-toned  private 
business  became  an  anachronism.  It  was  mani- 
fest destiny  that  one  ideal  or  the  other  should 
possess  the  whole  field  of  social  activity;  and  the 
battle  between  the  two  principles  began  to  be 
waged  in  the  very  citadel  and  heart  of  all  the 
Western  peoples.  The  abolishment  of  chattel 
slavery,  with  the  rise  of  constitutionalism  and 
universal  suffrage,  has  made  the  re-establish- 
ment of  the  double  moral  standard  quite  out  of 
the  question. 

The  die  is  cast;  and  either  the  Master  or  the 
166 


ADDENDA 


Hired  Man,  the  artist  or  the  chafierer,  must  rule 
the  house. 

So  far  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  hucksters 
have  it.  But  one  understands  little  of  the  re- 
venges of  history  —  the  sure  recoil  of  spiritual 
forces  —  who  does  not  know  that  the  long-re- 
pressed idealism  of  the  Western  races,  their 
baffled  art  and  chivalry,  are  gathering  for  a  return 
game.  The  Traders  had  it  for  a  day.  They 
reached  their  high-tide  in  the  United  States  the 
day  before  yesterday  —  say  in  1898. 

In  those  hard  times  of  poignant  prosperity 
millions  of  faces  were  drawn  in  dissimulation,  the 
fixed  face  of  the  trader  who  barters  his  life  for  a 
living.  The  professions  had  all  become  trades 
—  the  law  business,  the  newspaper  business,  the 
medical  business,  the  clerical  business  —  and  over 
and  under  all,  the  trade  of  politics.  From  the 
postman  to  the  President,  men  got  and  kept  their 
places  more  by  artifice  than  artistry.  Men  capa- 
ble in  happier  times  of  indisputable  honesty,  joc- 
und and  debonair,  climbed  to  high  places  by  the 
aid  of  the  "  system  "  and  the  "  machine  "  —  be- 
cause, bless  your  heart!  there  was  no  other  way 
to  climb.  Society  was  drenched  and  drowned  in 
the  reek  of  graft.  About  everybody  within  the 
range  of  ordinary  vision  kept  his  social  place  and 
drew  his  income  by  a  more  or  less  systematic  sub- 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


ordination  of  general  human  interests  to  some  in- 
terest that  was  special  and  private.  And  that  — 
if  the  ill-featured  word  has  a  meaning  —  is 
"  graft." 

What  minister  with  a  healthy  mind  could 
speak  it  without  losing  influence?  What  notably 
prosperous  lawyer  was  not  the  wage-slave  of  a 
corporation?  What  newspaper  man  but  laughed 
contemptuously  —  or  bitterly  —  at  the  very  name 
of  journalism?  The  mass  of  Americans  do  not 
yet  understand  this.  It  is  still  supposed  that  the 
Treason  was  only  of  the  Senate  and  of  poor  old 
Mr.  McCall  and  Standard  Oil;  whereas  the  Trea- 
son was  in  us  all.  The  trader's  —  traitor's  —  art 
was  the  only  fine  art  that  we  as  a  people  did  much 
affect. 

But  the  tide  has  turned.  And  it  would  run 
swiftly  —  if  only  sensible  men,  who  ought  to  know 
better,  were  less  content  to  paddle  in  the  shallows. 
Childish  is  the  notion  that  we  can  have  a  "  great 
moral  reform  "  that  shall  end  in  making  politi- 
cians and  preachers  devout,  and  trust  magnates 
and  millionaires  innocuous  —  so  that  ten  million 
frightened  little  business  men  can  return  with 
thankful  hearts  to  their  interrupted  game  of 
pluck-the-goose  and  beggar-my-neighbor !  It  is 
a  pipe-dream.  Nothing  like  that  ever  really  hap- 
pened. 

168 


ADDENDA 


Let  it  be  set  down  here  in  legible  type  that  the 
distinction  between  private  business  and  public 
business  has  grown  hazy  and  is  about  to  vanish. 
This  is  the  biggest  news  item  of  the  century  thus 
far.  Every  business  that  serves  the  public  is  a 
part  of  the  public  service ;  and  every  business  that 
does  not  is  a  public  nuisance.  Many  have  prophe- 
sied of  this.  Federal  Judge  Waite,  for  example, 
had  a  clear  glimpse  of  the  idea  some  years  ago 
when  he  said,  in  the  famous  case  of  Munn  against 
the  State  of  Illinois,  that  "  private  property,  when 
it  is  devoted  to  a  public  end  "  —  meaning  in  that 
case  the  plaintiff's  investment  of  his  money  in  a 
Chicago  grain  elevator  —  "becomes  subject  to  pub- 
lic regulation."  The  point  is  that  there  is  no 
stopping-place  in  our  rate-fixing,  food-inspecting, 
factory-regulating  career,  short  of  the  simple  and 
regenerative  conception  that  all  business  must  be 
raised  to  a  public  and  professional  standard;  that, 
all  down  the  line,  money-making  must  become  a 
distinctly  secondary  consideration,  and  that  the 
man  who  "  is  in  it  for  what  he  can  make  out 
of  it "  must  eat  at  the  second  table  with  the  hired 
hands. 


Now  it  would  seem  that  the  Church  of  the  near 
future,  whether  it  shall  be  called  by  that  name 

169 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


or  a  better,  will  be  a  company  of  men  who  preach, 
practice  law  and  medicine,  farm,  traffic,  and  man- 
ufacture because  they  are  interested  in  the  subdual 
of  the  earth  and  the  building  of  cities,  and  are 
bound  to  get  it  done  right.  Those  on  the  other 
hand  who  are  mainly  interested  in  making  money, 
by  any  means  not  jailable,  and  who  look  forward 
to  becoming  tall-hatted,  black-coated,  and  philan- 
thropic in  their  latter  years  —  may  continue  to 
run  the  old  kind  of  churches  so  long  as  there  are 
any  such  to  run. 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  the  new  kind  of  Church 
will,  by  its  very  nature,  recover  a  great  deal  of 
ground  that  has  been  vacated  by  the  old  kind. 
It  will  be  a  social  and  political  institution  —  in 
the  sense  that  it  will  hold  the  balance  of  practical 
power  between  the  wrangling  social  classes. 

And  in  the  third  place  the  new  Church  will  be 
the  basic  educational  institution  of  our  democratic 
communities,  the  university  of  the  people.  It 
will  have  nothing  to  do  with  any  kind  of  religion 
that  cannot  and  ought  not  to  penetrate  the  public 
schools. 

Having  thus  pulled  himself  together  and  gotten 
rid  of  the  triple  complex  of  feudal  idealisms  — 
ecclesiastical,  scholastic,  and  political  —  the  West- 
ern man  will  have  a  new  taste  for  existence,  and 
be  prepared  to  live  the  simple  life.  For  simplic- 

170 


ADDENDA 


ity  does  not  consist  in  sandals  and  sun-baths,  but 
mainly  in  getting  one's  mind  cleared  of  cant. 
•        •••        •        ••        •        • 

The  Money  Power  and  the  Mob  are  correlative 
terms;  they  produce  each  other.  Money  rules  be- 
cause men  are  for  sale;  and  they  are  for  sale 
because  they  need  the  money.  The  eternal  pull 
and  haul  between  plutocracy  and  proletarianism 
leads  no  whither,  unless  to  general  pessimism, 
neuroticism,  and  imbecility. 

What  the  situation  demands  is  a  mutuality  of 
those  who  are  not  in  the  market  either  to  buy 
brains  or  to  sell  them;  men  who  are  deadly  sick 
of  all  the  variegated  kinds  of  shuffling  and  lying, 
who  cannot  and  will  not  deny  themselves  the 
luxury  of  free  breathing  and  the  joy  of  being  un- 
muffled  and  disengaged,  who  are  determined  to 
play  at  their  work,  and  not  to  work  at  anything 
they  cannot  play  at,  and  play  fair.  Such  a  com- 
bination of  Round  Heads,  Beggars  of  Flanders, 
Gray  Friars,  Little  Brothers  of  Humility  —  are 
the  Fellows  of  the  University  Militant.  If  you 
cannot  grasp  the  idea,  you  are  not  called  or 
chosen. 


171 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


FOR     A     UNIVERSITY     QUADRANGLE 

SEVERAL  attempts  have  been  made  to  house  the 
Municipal  University,  but  the  motion  in  that  line 
has  been  slow.  In  December,  1905,  a  small  sum, 
a  thousand  dollars,  was  subscribed  toward  this 
project,  but  the  matter  was  postponed.  Two 
months  ago  a  contract  was  made  for  the  purchase 
of  the  fifty -foot  lot  immediately  north  of  All 
Souls'  Church;  and  plans  were  sketched  by  Mr. 
Siemans,  of  the  firm  of  Root  &  Siemans,  archi- 
tects. But,  after  some  weeks  of  negotiation,  it 
turned  out  that  the  lot  could  not  be  conveyed  with- 
out such  restrictions  as  would  utterly  spoil  the 
building  plan.  So  the  contract  was  cancelled. 

Mr.  Siemans'  plan  contemplated  an  inner  court 
or  patio,  seventy  feet  long  by  half  as  many  wide, 
with  a  pool,  spaces  for  huge  flower-pots,  a  little 
grass,  and  vines,  and  some  stone-seats  fit  for  the 
groves  of  Academia  —  the  kind  of  seats  that  fig- 
ure in  the  compositions  of  Alma-Tadema.  This 
little  quadrangle  was  to  be  enclosed  on  the 
east  and  west  by  two  stone  and  half-timbered 
buildings,  each  thirty  by  fifty  feet  on  the  ground 
and  two  stories  high;  on  the  north  by  an  open  gal- 
lery or  cloister,  and  on  the  south  by  the  stone  wall 

172 


ADDENDA 


of  the  church.  The  ground  floors  were  to  be  used 
for  club-rooms,  including  a  cuisine,  and  the  upper 
floors  for  lodging  —  reserved  for  men  who  should 
hold  some  such  relation  to  the  institution  that  the 
"residents"  do  to  a  college  settlement.  The  rentals 
they  would  pay  would  go  half  way  toward  sup- 
porting the  whole  affair. 

These  ideas  remain  to  be  carried  out  elsewhere, 
probably  on  a  site  nearer  the  heart  of  the  city. 


173 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


NOTES 

Mr.  Walsh's  article  on  "The  Work  of  a 
Citizens'  Lobby  "  is  offered  as  evidence  of  the  ex- 
traordinary power  that  can  be  exercised  over  leg- 
islation by  a  little  group  of  plain  citizens  who 
take  time  to  inform  themselves  and  concert  their 
action,  and  who  really  have  no  private  axe  to  grind. 
This  new-fashioned  lobby  was  made  up  mainly  of 
men  whose  names  are  on  the  roll  of  the  Municipal 
University,  but  the  movement  was  purely  spon- 
taneous and  unofficial.  Nobody  pretended  to  repre- 
sent anything  but  human  nature  and  himself.  The 
meetings  of  the  lobby  were  held  regularly  on 
Sunday  afternoons  in  the  vestry-room  of  St.  Paul's 
Church,  where  the  chairs  were  comfortable  and 
the  cigars  were  good;  and  were  continued  through 
most  of  the  time  that  the  Legislature  was  in 
session  at  Jefferson  City.  Every  bill  that  the  lobby 
proposed  to  deal  with  was  canvassed  at  these  meet- 
ings and  then  turned  over  to  a  special  committee. 
Week  by  week  several  members  of  the  company 
made  a  sojourn  at  Jefferson  City  —  spending  their 
time  and  their  money  in  so  quixotic  a  manner  that 
the  bills  were  passed  while  their  opponents  were 
groping  blindly  for  their  motives. 

The  tenement-house  problem  is  a  liberal  edu- 
cation in  sociology.  It  cuts  deep.  Probably  the 

174 


NOTES 


ultimate  solutions  cannot  be  reached  short  of  a 
clear  understanding  that  civilization  requires  the 
establishment  of  a  minimum  standard  of  living. 
Nobody  has  a  right  to  live  squalidly  —  not  in  a 
city.  He  ought  to  be  compelled  to  go  into  the 
woods  to  do  it.  A  mean  and  unhealthy  house 
should  be  illegal.  Hitherto,  municipal  reformers 
have  never  thought  to  do  more  than  mitigate  the 
misery  of  slums.  This  is  a  mistake.  The  medi- 
cation of  nuisances  is  too  complicated  a  process. 
It 's  easier  to  abolish  them. 

But  how  shall  poor  people  pay  rent  for  good 
houses?  How?  Why  not  abolish  the  poor  people 
too  ?  If  they  lived  in  decent  houses,  they  would  n't 
be  poor.  They  would  insist  upon  holding  their 
heads  up  —  as  well-lodged  horses  do. 

But  while  civilization  in  general  is  yawning 
toward  a  wake-up,  there  are  various  things  in  the 
line  of  making  good  houses  cheap  that  individuals 
can  do.  The  men  of  the  Municipal  University 
who  have  looked  into  this  matter  —  they  have 
given  a  good  deal  of  time  to  it  —  are  clear  that 
comfortable  low-grade  apartments  can  be  provided 
at  from  twenty-five  to  fifty  percent  less  than  the 
ruling  prices  —  and  pay  dividends  of  four  or 
five  per  cent  on  the  investment.  Some  months  ago 
they  sent  a  circular  letter  to  a  thousand  people  in 
Kansas  City  inviting  co-operation  in  this  kind  of  an 
enterprise.  There  was  very  little  response  to  this 
sally,  though  the  Municipal  Tenement-House 
Commission,  appointed  by  the  Mayor  supported 
the  project  and  approved  it  by  formal  resolution. 

A  committee  from  the  Municipal  University 
175 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


stands  ready  to  give  its  services  to  the  community 
in  the  organizing  of  a  building  company  on  the 
lines  suggested  above. 

The  University  of  the  People  is  not  to  be 
thought  of  as  a  compact  organization  framed  to 
perform  a  succession  of  public  feats.  It  is  rather 
a  fluent  and  spiritual  order,  an  invisible  church,  a 
conspiracy  of  those  who  find  satisfaction  in  putting 
a  touch  of  dare-devil  and  romance  to  their  every- 
day business.  The  association  forms  swiftly,  for 
this  purpose  or  for  that,  dissolves  into  thin  air,  and 
then  takes  shape  again.  Mostly  it  is  anonymous 
—  and  does  not  let  its  right  hand  know.  But  it 
makes  no  point  of  anonymity;  it  elects  officers  and 
takes  a  postoffice  address  —  for  certain  practical 
purposes.  There  are  no  dignitaries.  As  eight  hun- 
dred years  ago  in  the  Italian  city  of  Bologna,  an 
unknown  man,  a  student,  no  scholar  —  he  hap- 
pened to  be  a  youth  of  scarcely  twenty-one  —  was 
made  Rector  or  President  of  the  University,  to 
serve  as  a  mere  symbol  of  the  republicanism  of 
letters  —  so  now  it  is  in  Kansas  City.  The  offices 
are  not  honorific. 

The  Truth  is  not  in  majorities;  but  does  it  not 
lie  at  the  point  where  two  men  of  opposite  prej- 
udices meet  ?  And  if  it  is  a  sound  principle  that 
the  truth  is  elicited  by  the  cancellation  of  partiali- 
ties, is  there  not  hope  of  an  association  such  as 
this?  It  includes  "  practical  politicians,"  men  who 
are  always  consulted  by  the  party  managers  of 
both  parties  in  this  State;  it  includes  a  man  who 

176 


NOTES 


has  been  at  the  head  of  the  Employers'  Associa- 
tion here  and  another  who  was  for  years  the  chief 
of  the  labor  organizations  in  Kansas  City.  There 
are  lawyers  and  gospellers,  Trojans  and  Tyrians, 
Jews,  Turks  and  Infidels.  Shade  of  Gotthold  Les- 
sing !  Is  there  not  stuff  here  for  a  dramatic  poem 
—  a  new  "  Nathan  the  Wise  "  and  parable  of 
the  three  rings  ? 

The  federation  of  the  world  is  supposed  to  be 
a  problem  in  international  diplomacy.  This  is  a 
mistake.  It  is  a  domestic,  a  municipal  problem. 
As  General  Hancock  said  of  the  tariff,  with  more 
wit  than  was  appreciated:  "  It  is  a  local  issue." 

In  1861  William  H.  Seward,  Lincoln's  Secre- 
tary of  State,  deliberately  planned  to  bring  on  a 
war  with  Great  Britain  in  order  to  draw  the  North 
and  South  together  against  a  common  enemy. 
Seward  was  a  good  statescraftsman;  he  knew  his 
trade.  Under  modern  economic  conditions  every 
country  in  Europe,  America,  and  the  newly  aroused 
Orient  tends  constantly  and  more  or  less  rapidly 
toward  civil  war  —  toward  a  violent  rupture  be- 
tween the  debtor  and  the  creditor  class.  Whenever 
the  strain  approaches  the  breaking-point,  sound 
statesmanship  prescribes  a  foreign  war.  It  is  the 
only  specific  that  sound  statesmanship  of  the  tra- 
ditionary kind  knows  of  —  for  restoring  the  faint- 
ing sense  of  social  solidarity  —  i.e.,  commercial 
credit. 

Such  has  been  the  origin  of  all  the  international 
wars  of  the  last  century  —  plainly  of  the  Russo- 
Japanese  war,  on  both  sides;  of  the  Boer  war,  on 

177 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


the  British  side;  of  the  Spanish-American  war,  on 
the  side  of  Spain  at  least  —  and  so  on,  back  to 
the  Napoleonic  wars. 

The  gains  of  the  Hague  Congresses  are  mostly 
illusory.  The  international  questions  are  mere 
distorted  phases  of  the  social  questions.  A  peace 
conference  in  Kansas  City  in  which  the  Commer- 
cial Club  should  establish  a  permanent  human 
understanding  with  the  Industrial  Council  of  the 
local  trade-unions  would  have  greater  historical 
consequences  than  anything  that  lies  within  the 
possibilities  of  the  distinguished  company  at  the 
Dutch  Capital.  When  the  social  contradiction 
reaches  its  solution  in  a  single  American  city,  we 
shall  sight  the  terminal  of  international  war.  For 
every  neighboring  municipality  will  be  compelled 
to  rise  to  the  new  standard  of  civilization;  since 
no  city  languishing  under  the  immense  frictional 
loss  of  the  class  struggle  can  compete  for  a  single 
year  with  one  that  has  eliminated  that  waste.  And 
when  the  whole  country  has  thus  mobilized  its 
creative  forces,  it  can  impose  peace  upon  the 
world. 

War  is  at  bottom  a  business  enterprise.  The 
gist  of  military  power  lies  in  the  command  of  the 
wheat-fields  and  the  shops.  The  soldier  shoots 
and  the  commissary  does  the  rest.  It  follows  that 
when  this  country  shall  have  acquired  an  incom- 
parable economic  advantage  over  its  neighbors  — 
which  it  has  not  yet,  in  spite  of  vulgar  boasts  — 
it  will  make  its  good  counsels  mandatory  and  ir- 
resistible in  the  cabinets  of  Europe  and  Asia. 


NOTES 


To-day  Japan  is  being  driven  into  war  by  the 
economic  tension  in  its  home  affairs.  It  is  mainly 
an  agricultural  country;  and  it  supports  its  pomp 
of  empire  on  an  area  of  arable  land  slightly  larger 
than  that  of  a  circle  having  Kansas  City  as  a 
centre  with  a  radius  reaching  to  St.  Joseph —  a 
radius  say,  for  good  measure,  of  seventy-five  miles. 
Its  public  debt  is  out  of  all  proportion  even  to  the 
debts  of  the  sweating  European  peoples.  Japan 
must  expand,  or  explode  —  unless,  indeed,  it  shall 
hear  the  gospel  of  the  university,  and  precede  this 
country  in  repentance. 

The  Union  Station  problem  brings  us  face  to 
face  with  the  insoluble  contradiction  between  pub- 
lic and  private  business.  There  is  absolutely  no 
reasonable  solution  of  the  problem  in  the  shape 
in  which  it  is  posed.  The  negotiation  drags  so 
interminably  because  of  the  abnormality,  the  mon- 
strosity of  the  general  proposition  —  that  a  civic 
corporation  should  deliberately  bargain  to  give 
its  gates  for  a  thousand  years  —  or  fifty  —  into 
the  keeping  of  another  corporation  having  wholly 
adverse  interests! 

The  two  corporations  —  the  Municipality  and 
the  Terminal  Company  —  are  constructed  on  op- 
posite plans;  one  is  as  foreign  to  the  other  as  St. 
Petersburg  to  Pekin.  The  Municipal  corporation 
is  so  constituted  that  its  officers  can  look  for  pro- 
motion and  a  career  if  they  succeed  in  lowering 
the  costs  of  transportation;  but  the  officers  of  the 
Terminal  Company  can  advance  their  fortunes 
only  in  the  opposite  direction. 

179 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


Here  is  the  whole  problem  of  the  trusts,  the 
problem  of  corporate  monopoly  in  a  nut-shell. 
The  true  statement  of  the  problem  is:  How  shall 
we  reorganize  the  private  corporations  so  that 
they  shall  become  public,  in  the  sense  that  their 
officers  shall  have  the  same  motive  that  the  officers 
of  a  city  have  —  the  same  chance  to  grow  by 
serving  civilization? 

All  the  tedious  and  sordid  governmental  devices 
for  tricking  the  corporation-managers  with  spies 
or  scaring  them  with  penalties  will  pass  as  a  hag- 
gard dream.  Men,  on  the  average,  are  very  hu- 
man —  and  much  alike.  The  difference  between 
the  counsel  of  the  Terminal  Company,  and  the 
city  counsellor,  is  not  personal,  but  institutional. 
The  excellent  lawyer  for  the  Terminal  Company 
happens  to  have  implicated  his  fortunes  in  an 
institutional  type  that  is  hastening  to  become  as 
Nineveh  and  Tyre. 

The  self-contained  private  business  corporation 
built  to  make  money  for  its  stockholders,  by  any 
means  short  of  a  head-end  collision  with  public 
law  —  is  obsolescent.  It  is  not  guessing  much 
to  say  that  in  the  "  public  service  "  corporation  of 
the  near  future  the  following  considerations  will 
be  worked  out : 

(1)  The  stockholders  will  cease  to  be  owners 
and  will  come  to  be  considered  merely  as  preferred 
creditors ;  the  managers  will  be  regarded  as  agents 
of  the  public. 

(2)  There  will  be  a  maximum-salary  scale  and 
a  minimum-wage  scale. 

((3)   The  public  authority  will  limit  interest  and 
180 


NOTES 


dividends  at  a  rate  just  high  enough  to  fetch  the 
required  capital;  and  then  will  regulate  the  ser- 
vice-charges to  match. 


THE  WORK  OF  A  CITIZENS'   LOBBY 

FRANK  P.  WALSH 

THE  last  General  Assembly  passed  more  radical 
legislation  than  any  that  has  ever  convened  since 
Missouri  became  a  State.  The  railroad  and  public 
utility  corporations  of  the  State  maintained  a  most 
active  and  aggressive  lobby  during  both  the  regular 
and  special  sessions.  The  men  composing  this 
lobby  were  surprised  and  horrified  to  find  a  few 
well-posted  and  active  men  in  charge  of  every 
proposed  law  affecting  the  general  welfare  of  the 
people.  These  men,  comprising  a  sort  of  "  peo- 
ple's lobby,"  were  on  hand  at  every  committee 
meeting  prepared  to  argue  the  merits  of  the  pro- 
posed measure,  to  submit  legal  authorities  as  to 
its  constitutionality  and  to  assist  in  every  way 
by  statistics  and  legislative  history  of  other  States 
to  guide  the  legislators  aright. 

The  fight  for  the  passage  of  what  was  known  as 
the  Enabling  Act  was  the  liveliest  contest  of  the 
session.  It  was  defeated  by  the  manoeuvring  of 
the  corporation  lobby  in  the  regular  session,  but 
was  submitted  by  Governor  Folk  in  his  call  for  a 
special  session  —  and  passed.  This  bill  gives  the 
absolute  authority  to  the  municipalities  of  the 
State  to  fix  rates  for  the  service  of  all  public  utili- 
ties within  their  corporate  limits  and  to  provide 

181 


THE    UNIVERSITY   MILITANT 


and  enforce  fines  and  penalties  to  make  the  legis- 
lation effective. 

Our  new  public-utility  law  is  the  most  far-reach- 
ing and  comprehensive  law  of  this  character  passed 
by  any  State  in  the  Union.  The  corporations' 
lobby  first  attempted  to  defeat  the  law  and  finally 
offered  as  a  compromise  the  State  Commission  Law 
lately  recommended  by  Governor  Hughes  and 
passed  by  the  New  York  Legislature. 

Among  other  laws  of  great  public  advantage 
passed  by  the  State  Legislature  may  be  mentioned 
the  following: 

1.  Reducing  passenger  rates  upon  all  railroads 
over  forty-five  miles  in  length  to  two  cents. 

2.  The  Maximum  Freight  Rate  Law,  which, 
if   it   be   permitted   to   be    enforced  by   Federal 
Judge  McPherson,  will  save  millions  of  dollars 
annually  to  the  producers  and  consumers  of  the 
State. 

3.  A  comprehensive  and  effective  law  prohib- 
iting child  labor. 

4.  An  amendment  to  the  State  Constitution  pro- 
viding for  initiative  and  referendum. 

This  latter  law  gives  the  people  the  right  to 
initiate  legislation  upon  a  petition  setting  forth 
the  proposed  law  and  signed  by  eight  per  cent  of 
the  voters  of  at  least  two  thirds  of  the  congres- 
sional districts  of  the  State.  It  also  gives  to  the 
people  the  power  to  have  all  laws  (except  those 
for  the  immediate  preservation  of  the  public  peace, 
health  and  safety  and  laws  making  appropriations 
for  current  expenses  of  the  State  Government, 
for  the  maintenance  of  the  State  institutions,  and 

182 


NOTES 


for  the  support  of  public  schools)  referred  to  the 
people  for  ratification  or  rejection,  and  abolishes 
the  veto  power  of  the  Governor  as  to  all  measures 
so  referred  directly  to  the  people. 

5.  Giving  the  jury  in  capital  punishment  cases 
the  option  to  inflict  either  the  death  penalty  or  im- 
prisonment for  life  in  the  penitentiary. 

The  practical  effect  of  this  law  will  be  to  abol- 
ish capital  punishment,  that  relic  of  the  dark  ages. 

6.  Providing  for  forfeiture  of  the  charter  of 
any  railroad  or  insurance  company  that  shall  re- 
move a  case  to  the  Federal  Court. 

7.  Prohibiting    the    railroad    companies    from 
permitting    telegraph    operators    and    train    dis- 
patchers to  work  for  more  than  eight  consecutive 
hours  in  twenty-four. 

Many  of  the  deplorable  casualties  upon  rail- 
roads have  been  caused  by  the  long  hours  which 
railroad  companies  have  compelled  this  class  of 
their  employees  to  work. 

8.  A  general  state  primary  law.    This  law  pro- 
vides for  nomination  by  all  political  parties  for 
the  state  and  county  offices  throughout  the  entire 
State  upon  the  same  day,  with  the  same  number 
of  polling-places,  and  with  the  same  penalties  for 
illegal  practices  as  in  case  of  a  general  election. 

9.  Extending  the  power  of  the  factory  inspec- 
tors and  increasing  the  number  of  assistants.    This 
law  ought  to  go  far  towards  protecting  the  lives 
and  limbs  of  persons  working  in  the  great  indus- 
trial centres  of  the  State. 

10.  Granting  railroad  commissioners  the  power 
to  fix  railroad  rates  and  providing  that  all  orders 

183 


THE    UNIVERSITY    MILITANT 


so  made  shall  be  effective  until  overruled  by  a 
court  of  competent  jurisdiction. 

11.  To  strengthen  the  Anti-Trust  Law  by  pro- 
viding that  violations  thereof  shall  be  punished 
by  imprisonment  as  well  as  by  fines. 

12.  Making   mine    operators    and   owners   re- 
sponsible to  their  servants  for  injuries  caused  by 
the  negligence  of  fellow-servants. 

13.  Increasing  the   amount   of  liability  in   all 
cases  for  deaths  by  negligence  from  five  thousand 
to  ten  thousand  dollars. 

14.  Providing  that  the  right  of  action  for  per- 
sonal injury  shall  survive  the  death  of  the  injured 
person. 

15.  Requiring   switches   and  guard-rails   to  be 
blocked  for  the  safety  of  railroad  employees. 

1 6.  Compelling    railroad    companies   to    equip 
their  engines,  cars  and  trains  with  safety  appli- 
ances. 

The  men  who  represented  the  side  of  the 
people  in  the  passage  of  these  new  laws  were,  as 
usual,  denounced  by  the  corporation  lobby  as 
^dreamers,  socialists,  cranks,  kickers,  etc.,  but  they 
pursued  their  work  with  cheerful  enthusiasm  that 
cared  not  for  difficulties  or  criticism. 

Much  aid  was  given  the  passage  of  these  laws 
by  incorporating  pledges  for  their  enactment  in 
the  last  Democratic  State  platform,  thus  making 
them  in  a  sense  party  measures  of  the  dominant 
party. 

Governor  Folk  also  included  them  in  his  mes- 
sage at  the  opening  of  the  Legislature,  and 
strongly  urged  their  passage. 

184 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 


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r'  '•  y..'  I92/ 

LIBRARY  USE 

JAN  3    1956 
JAN  3    19f6Ufc 

lOJul'STWJ 

J.UL   29  1957 

RETURNED  TO 
MATH.-STAT.  IB. 


JUL 


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Y/r-v 

07062 


220993 


